I realize that I'm apparently swimming upstream here, but I suspect that a lot of the people thundering about this are simply accepting it uncritically because they want to believe it, insofar as it confirms their particular worldview.
So, to remind everyone, we have exactly one source for this, the professor, who is at best relaying the story secondhand to all of us - we do not have an eyewitness report, in that the student to whom this supposedly happened hasn't given his version to anyone else, including the paper in which this was reported. Hell, it doesn't look like the paper even bothered to contact DHS for any sort of comment.
I dunno, I really think I'd like a little more info. More than just the say-so of some professor dude, who may or may not have a vested interest in telling tales.
Social engineering, especially on the scale that would be required to reach "secure" government, industry, or criminal computers, would be an enormous undertaking for most groups looking to get this information.
I think you underestimate (or overlook entirely) the efficacy of low-tech methods of social engineering. If I have possession of your secure computer, and the information on it is valuable enough to me, I'll just fucking beat the password/token/keycard/whatever out of you.
Sadism trumps encryption, which is why physical security is a critical part of any security scheme.
Well, yeah, but "fairly new" doesn't have to mean "just came out of the box yesterday" - I'm sitting in front of a year-old Dell that came with a pair of SATA connectors on the mobo.
Ah, c'mon. Let's be honest - for this thing, "diddle bits" = "play games". For virtually any other task, it's not worth the weight or the expense. And I don't know about you, but I rarely play games on a deadline, such that the twenty seconds it takes to hibernate are critical:)
But that's my point - if that's what you're doing with the thing, you're never really using the battery in the first place, and hence you don't really need one, so therefore the battery is just deadweight. Leave it off and give your back a break:)
Does that happen often enough to justify the price? That is, the last time we had an unexpected power cut here was two years ago, and that was while a hurricane was blowing through town, so it wasn't all that unexpected to begin with. Nor was I interested in doing much gaming at the time anyway:)
In any case, if it does happen that often - e.g., you live in California or some third-world country with an unreliable power grid - wouldn't you be better off getting a UPS? I've gotta believe that a SFF desktop with comparable specs + UPS is still less than this thing costs.
I dunno - maybe I'm alone on this, but I'm not getting any younger, and a top-of-the-line luggable without the cinderblock-like anchor of a battery sounds like the kind of thing my back would appreciate.
With all that shit bolted on to the thing, battery life is surely going to be around eleven seconds once you unplug it - an assumption on my part that's surely confirmed by the fact that neither Taco nor the mfr's website bother to discuss battery time. So why not make it into a luggable computer? Leave off the battery, and shave that lardass down to merely ridiculous levels of heaviness instead of insanely heavy.
it violates the principles of federalism and subsidiarity, i.e., that power should always devolve to the lowest level of government capable of carrying it out, or to the people themselves.
That's certainly not a principle of the American federal system. The state is the unit of sovereignty, historically speaking - power flows to local governments from the state, not to the state from local governments as you assert. Municipalities have as much or as little legal authority as the state grants them - no more and no less. In that light, this move is perfectly in accord with American traditions of federalism - the state of Massachusetts is simply retaking a power it almost certainly granted to local governments in the first place.
This should not be construed as an argument that it's necessarily a wise move, merely that the principles of federalism are not somehow discordant with it. You can certainly also argue that power should flow the way you wish it to, from the bottom up, but that's definitely not how it is now, nor is that how it's ever been.
...but the big secret, and the reason it's so cool, is that if you press the buttons in the right combination, a secret compartment opens to reveal an ounce of pure heroin. You heard it here first, and remember - it's on teh intarweb now, so it must be true.
...Roger Ebert is credited with at least one game review, a piece on the obscure Cosmology of Kyoto published in Wired in 1995. He reviewed it positively - he said it was wonderful.
Not just a university -- a private university. Perhaps the GP was confusing The University of Kansas with Kansas State University.
One of you is confused, anyway. Actually, you both are - you, because both KSU and KU are public universities, chartered by the state of Kansas. Turn in your "informative" moderation immediately, while I arrange for the moderator who gave it to you to be horsewhipped for not even fucking googling it to see if you were right.
Then again, the original poster is confused in a somewhat more substantive manner, since the notion that critiques of religion and religious doctrines are somehow off-limits for public universities is rather goofy.
I know we're not going to agree, but I personally don't like the idea of giving up privacy and making my movements easier to track just for a false sense of security.
Me either. Except that I'm not sure I buy that it's really a false sense of security - implemented properly, something like this could potentially save a lot of lives, which makes it a bit more complicated than "should we throw away some privacy for nothing in return?" It's not for nothing - the payoff from having such a system in place is potentially huge.
If the point is that you register at the airport with where you are going (or been), then when you have already come back and it turns out that the population at that location is dropping like flies (or birds:) then they can send the black helicopters to spray your house.
Exactly, but in order to do that, they have to know who you are. Also, the helicopters may not be black:)
i like how you are oblivious to the simplicity of the request.
LOL. I'm all ears, then. You wake up tomorrow to find that there's a major outbreak of a new strain of bird flu in some Asian city. This strain is now transmissible from person to person and it's airborne. How do you find Americans who were in that city three days ago, but aren't there any more? How do you prevent each potential Typhoid Mary from walking around your town and coughing on everyone she meets?
land of free aint wat it used to be
My guess is that whatever you're imagining, it never really was in the first place.
...while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.
- Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144 (1963)
I think in the event of a pandemic the gouvernment has other priorities than tying your name to your phone number.
Nah, the point is io insure that if you're in an area that's suddenly become hot, you don't hop on a plane and bring it home without them knowing about it. See my reply to the other poster above.
Every mayor city has a mobile phone system, and implementing the 'send an SMS to every newcomer' system should be trivial.
See above. As I said, the point is not so that you know about the risk, the point is so that they know who's been exposed, in order to keep those people from knowingly or unknowingly spreading the epidemic back home.
But what does Ho Chi Minh city have to do with this alerting system.
I suspect that the idea is to be able to find people who have been in contaminated areas after the fact, so that they can be monitored and quarantined if necessary. I doubt the idea is to preemptively notify people before they travel to high risk areas - rather, it's to find people who just left Phnom Penh to return to the States, now that people in Phnom Penh (or wherever) are suddenly dropping like flies.
A) How is that anonymous? They have your phone number, after all. Presumably, the federal government has the resources to tie that to your name in the event of an emergency, right?
B) That's great for Europe and the rest of the world, but the next influenza pandemic doesn't seem likely to originate in Vienna or Nice. Does Ho Chi Minh city have such a system in place? Something makes me doubt it.
It is a noble goal, but couldn't they do this anonymously?
Anonymously? What, will they use a war-dialer to randomly notify people that someone somewhere was likely exposed to a new strain of bird flu? Maybe a really big phone tree?
Apart from the fact that the progress on the systems hasn't gone well after this many billions of dollars, the usefulness of a boost phase missle defense system is questionable at best.
This isn't a boost-phase system.
The system would be easier to construct given the shorter range for the interceptors to travel to target, the targets are moving more slowly, and there are fewer targets since any MIRVs haven't reached the point where they independently target.
This is a theater-defense system - it's a high-altitude defense against ballistic missiles such as Scuds and the like. It's not designed as a defense against strategic weapons.
Really, your complaint makes almost no sense at all - whatever weapon you're objecting to, it isn't THAAD.
When Vista does release will it truly have less bugs?
It will undoubtedly be like every other software release in the history of mankind - it will fix some old bugs, and introduce some new ones. That's just the way these things go.
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So, to remind everyone, we have exactly one source for this, the professor, who is at best relaying the story secondhand to all of us - we do not have an eyewitness report, in that the student to whom this supposedly happened hasn't given his version to anyone else, including the paper in which this was reported. Hell, it doesn't look like the paper even bothered to contact DHS for any sort of comment.
I dunno, I really think I'd like a little more info. More than just the say-so of some professor dude, who may or may not have a vested interest in telling tales.
I think you underestimate (or overlook entirely) the efficacy of low-tech methods of social engineering. If I have possession of your secure computer, and the information on it is valuable enough to me, I'll just fucking beat the password/token/keycard/whatever out of you.
Sadism trumps encryption, which is why physical security is a critical part of any security scheme.
Well, yeah, but "fairly new" doesn't have to mean "just came out of the box yesterday" - I'm sitting in front of a year-old Dell that came with a pair of SATA connectors on the mobo.
...you're still a wingnut.
Ah, c'mon. Let's be honest - for this thing, "diddle bits" = "play games". For virtually any other task, it's not worth the weight or the expense. And I don't know about you, but I rarely play games on a deadline, such that the twenty seconds it takes to hibernate are critical :)
But that's my point - if that's what you're doing with the thing, you're never really using the battery in the first place, and hence you don't really need one, so therefore the battery is just deadweight. Leave it off and give your back a break :)
In any case, if it does happen that often - e.g., you live in California or some third-world country with an unreliable power grid - wouldn't you be better off getting a UPS? I've gotta believe that a SFF desktop with comparable specs + UPS is still less than this thing costs.
I dunno - maybe I'm alone on this, but I'm not getting any younger, and a top-of-the-line luggable without the cinderblock-like anchor of a battery sounds like the kind of thing my back would appreciate.
With all that shit bolted on to the thing, battery life is surely going to be around eleven seconds once you unplug it - an assumption on my part that's surely confirmed by the fact that neither Taco nor the mfr's website bother to discuss battery time. So why not make it into a luggable computer? Leave off the battery, and shave that lardass down to merely ridiculous levels of heaviness instead of insanely heavy.
That's certainly not a principle of the American federal system. The state is the unit of sovereignty, historically speaking - power flows to local governments from the state, not to the state from local governments as you assert. Municipalities have as much or as little legal authority as the state grants them - no more and no less. In that light, this move is perfectly in accord with American traditions of federalism - the state of Massachusetts is simply retaking a power it almost certainly granted to local governments in the first place.
This should not be construed as an argument that it's necessarily a wise move, merely that the principles of federalism are not somehow discordant with it. You can certainly also argue that power should flow the way you wish it to, from the bottom up, but that's definitely not how it is now, nor is that how it's ever been.
...but the big secret, and the reason it's so cool, is that if you press the buttons in the right combination, a secret compartment opens to reveal an ounce of pure heroin. You heard it here first, and remember - it's on teh intarweb now, so it must be true.
Anybody play that one? How was it?
Ah, see now I feel bad for being so grouchy. It's the decaf, I tell ya :)
One of you is confused, anyway. Actually, you both are - you, because both KSU and KU are public universities, chartered by the state of Kansas. Turn in your "informative" moderation immediately, while I arrange for the moderator who gave it to you to be horsewhipped for not even fucking googling it to see if you were right.
Then again, the original poster is confused in a somewhat more substantive manner, since the notion that critiques of religion and religious doctrines are somehow off-limits for public universities is rather goofy.
Not that I'm implying that's bad or anything - please don't sue me.
Me either. Except that I'm not sure I buy that it's really a false sense of security - implemented properly, something like this could potentially save a lot of lives, which makes it a bit more complicated than "should we throw away some privacy for nothing in return?" It's not for nothing - the payoff from having such a system in place is potentially huge.
It doesn't stop every potential vector, but the point is to mitigate at least one likely vector.
What makes you think bird flu will spread when everyone knows about it?
Incubation period, like the other poster said.
SARs never got here.
Dunno about you, but 250+ cases of SARS in Toronto is close enough to "here" to make me a touch edgy.
Exactly, but in order to do that, they have to know who you are. Also, the helicopters may not be black :)
Well, yeah. If I had to guess, the email thing is probably a last-resort kind of deal. Who knows, though? ;)
LOL. I'm all ears, then. You wake up tomorrow to find that there's a major outbreak of a new strain of bird flu in some Asian city. This strain is now transmissible from person to person and it's airborne. How do you find Americans who were in that city three days ago, but aren't there any more? How do you prevent each potential Typhoid Mary from walking around your town and coughing on everyone she meets?
land of free aint wat it used to be
My guess is that whatever you're imagining, it never really was in the first place.
Nah, the point is io insure that if you're in an area that's suddenly become hot, you don't hop on a plane and bring it home without them knowing about it. See my reply to the other poster above.
Every mayor city has a mobile phone system, and implementing the 'send an SMS to every newcomer' system should be trivial.
See above. As I said, the point is not so that you know about the risk, the point is so that they know who's been exposed, in order to keep those people from knowingly or unknowingly spreading the epidemic back home.
I suspect that the idea is to be able to find people who have been in contaminated areas after the fact, so that they can be monitored and quarantined if necessary. I doubt the idea is to preemptively notify people before they travel to high risk areas - rather, it's to find people who just left Phnom Penh to return to the States, now that people in Phnom Penh (or wherever) are suddenly dropping like flies.
B) That's great for Europe and the rest of the world, but the next influenza pandemic doesn't seem likely to originate in Vienna or Nice. Does Ho Chi Minh city have such a system in place? Something makes me doubt it.
Anonymously? What, will they use a war-dialer to randomly notify people that someone somewhere was likely exposed to a new strain of bird flu? Maybe a really big phone tree?
This isn't a boost-phase system.
The system would be easier to construct given the shorter range for the interceptors to travel to target, the targets are moving more slowly, and there are fewer targets since any MIRVs haven't reached the point where they independently target.
This is a theater-defense system - it's a high-altitude defense against ballistic missiles such as Scuds and the like. It's not designed as a defense against strategic weapons.
Really, your complaint makes almost no sense at all - whatever weapon you're objecting to, it isn't THAAD.
Turn down the echo :)
When Vista does release will it truly have less bugs?
It will undoubtedly be like every other software release in the history of mankind - it will fix some old bugs, and introduce some new ones. That's just the way these things go.