Aren't most air contaminants measured in parts per million or parts per billion? We are talking about picograms per cubic meter. A cubic meter of air weighs around 1 kilogram, so we are talking about 10 to the minus 12 grams per 1000 grams, or 15 decimal places difference. 29 to 850 parts per thousand trillion. I don't even know what comes after trillion! That's a concentration so low that you could find basically anything at that level. Completely meaningless statistic.
Am I the only one who remembers the Saturday morning cartoons from the 80's that were thinly-disguised adds for plastic toys? Transformers and Go-Bots are the ones that come to mind, but I know there were more. Has anybody been stuck in a room with a TV playing Yu-Gi-Oh? It's a show about people playing the card game, although they have some obscure explanation for why the stuff is "really" happening to the characters playing it. Pokemon is another example, but I'm less sure about it because the show might have come before the toys. Somebody must think that kids who grew up on this garbage and didn't recognize it for what it was then won't recognize it when the toys being sold are more complicated.
Sadly, this is almost a necessary evil. The old way of paying for the production of the content with commercial breaks doesn't work so well because DVR's let people skip the commercials entirely. If we want low-cost television programming, we've got to pay for it somehow, and this is one way. The writers' guild clearly hates it, and I don't blame them, but the money has to come from somewhere. The only other option is premium programming like HBO, which not enough people pay for. I'm one of the ones who doesn't pay for it, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that product placement is rampant there too.
I know I'm too many pages down for this to get read, but I'm going to say it anyway. The first and only thing I can think of right now is get rid of this whole enemy combatant thing. Tell the directors of the CIA and any armed forces involved "You have 30 days to reclassify all the enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay and wherever else they're being held. 30 days from now, they will ALL be either charged with a crime and given legal representation, classified prisoners of war and allowed visits by the Red Cross, or set free. Anybody who can not accept these terms has 7 days to give me their resignation. The timer starts now."
it is impossible for anyone to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt. As mentioned higher up, this is a civil case where the burden of proof is not "reasonable doubt", it is "preponderance of evidence." Reasonable Doubt is "are you reasonably sure?", but Preponderance of Evidence is more like "if you had to guess (and you do)".
I didn't RTFA, I must admit, but is the judgement primarily punitive damages or compensatory? Punitive I guess would make some sense, although like most here I think the amount was absurd. Compensatory would be an even worse travesty as I've not seen a shred of believable evidence that file sharing is hurting the music industry.
I agree completely. I recently migrated from a Palm device that died (Treo 270) to a Blackberry. I almost had to go Windows Mobile for lots more money in order to keep handwriting recognition, but I decided to give Blackberry a try. I still wish I could write on the thing as I think that's a better way, but the Blackberry Pearl's keyboard (2 letters per key) and its guessing software is surprisingly good. I'd still rather have a stylus, but these days handwriting recognition is the only thing that Palm still does well. It's positively archaic next to the offerings from Blackberry and Microsoft.
The Linux transition has been rumored for quite a while. Hopefully they have it mostly working now so we'll see something usable in less than 2 years.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Evidence that is obtained by any party that does not follow this rule should be inadmissible!
The tricky thing about pretexting is it's not a "search and seizure" because the person being suckered has every right to refuse. They don't, because they take the pretexter at his word that he is who he claims to be. If a guy shows up at the door claiming to be doing a property survey or something and I let him in, he hasn't broken the law. If I deny him access and he forces his way in, he's broken the law and I'm well within my rights to call the police and/or beat the crap out of him. Unless the house in question is in Texas, where it seems to be state law that I'm required to shoot him instead...
Pretexting is dishonest, slimy, bordering on despicable, and I think should be illegal, but it doesn't actually violate the 4th Amendment.
The police and licensed investigators, however, are allowed to lie to suspects in the course of an investigation
Like most slashdot readers, IANAL, but the difference between a "licensed investigator" and an "ordinary citizen" is minimal. I don't know what the licensing restrictions are for private detectives and such, but they aren't much. Licensing implies a code of ethics and some oversight by whatever organization regulates the licensee, but there isn't much of that for investigators. Do they even need any law enforcement background? Has a licensed investigator ever lost his license for lying, cheating, abuses of position, or similar?
Maybe Mitnick's Art of Deception or similar should be required reading at the highschool level so more people would catch pretexting attempts.
I wish games like WoW, which we call Role Playing Games, could be renamed to something else. I've played City of Heroes and Dark Age of Camelot, and the problem I have with them is that the interface is too unwieldy for role-playing. A bunch of friends sitting around a table occasionally rolling dice can let their imaginations go because the interface (ie. the table that you can stand up from if necessary) doesn't get in the way. When you have to type to say anything, remember the non-intuitive keystrokes to do anything (particularly in early DAOC), or type an obscure slash command to do anything other than stand or walk there isn't much of an opportunity for pretending to be something else. Since that is the essence of role-playing, you can't role play without it!
The other problem, as mentioned in other posts, is the inherent stability of the virtual world. Much of the thrill of "adventuring" is changing the world, or at least standing above the crowd. With 5 real guys in a living room there's plenty of room for them all to be famous in the virtual world. In an MMORPG all the players have the same opportunity to stand above the crowd, which means that most of them don't. The two games that I've played addressed this in small ways: A DAOC crafter can take pride in his/her repeat customers and the amount of gear out there with his/her name on it, and the custom base raid option in City of Heroes / Villains has some potential, but basically every character in this type of game has to play a subset of the same stories as everybody else.
Maybe MMOCBG (Massively Multiplayer Online Character Building Game) would be a better choice, either for the obvious reason or because suffering supposedly builds character... Or Massively Multiplayer Online Repetitive Metric Increasing Game. Massively Multiplayer Online Repetitive Accounting Game? How about Massively Multiplayer Online Repetitive Procedure Game? That way you wouldn't have to change the acronym!
Actually, it's NOT a bad analogy - becuase the reality is that most people look at their computers in exactly the same way they do toasters. They expect to be able to turn it on and have it work. Period.
But there is the second half of that: People are expected to be able to plug in the toaster, load it with bread, and press the start button. Having a WAP figure out how much security you need and which devices are yours (and therefore allowed to connect) would be the equivalent of the toaster that plugs itself and loads itself.
Are you going to tell me that you actually read the owner's manual that came with your car? And let's be honest - *most* people even only know that they need air in their tires when the guy at the gas stations TELLS them that they do
I haven't read it cover to cover or anything, but yes I've seen the inside of it, particularly the scheduled maintenance sections. Of course, I also had to take a class and a driver's test before I was allowed to use the car in the first place. You're right about most people's lack of knowledge about the workings of their car, though. But if they don't check the tires, and they don't designate somebody else to, then they take the consequences of not doing the maintenance: tires wearing out too soon, low mileage, getting stranded by the side of the road, and etc.
I will, however, freely admit that I have no more basis in fact for saying that than you do to say that it *wasn't* protected.
There is a one-liner in the article about how most wireless adapters are configured to find open access points. This isn't much more than a hint that it was a wide open network, but it is a hint.
OK, I have to concede your point that "willfully ignorant" is at least informed enough to know that you're ignorant, but I disagree with your car analogy. A car owner is expected to know that you have to put gas in the car if you want it keep running, if the inside is too cold you move this lever from the blue lines to the red lines, that you should put air in the tires occasionally, and take it to a garage for an oil change every three months. Any machine (appliance, electronic, garden tool, garden spade) requires a bit of knowledge to use it properly, and computer equipment is not an exception to this. Some theories of "user friendliness" involve dropping the "computer literacy" to ridiculously low levels. To stretch another analogy, you would expect a toaster to be able to tell when the bread is done, but you wouldn't expect it to be able to plug itself in and get the bread out of the breadbox for you.
You don't need to know what frequency band or collision detection scheme wireless uses in order secure it any more than you need to know how to build a car from scratch in order to check the oil. If somebody can't be bothered to change the defaults of their access point then they don't have the right to complain that somebody else is using it. If you set up WEP and somebody hacks through it that's a different matter, but this was an open network.
Some good ideas here about the cars. The catalyst in the exhaust system could be called a "catalytic converter". I'll bet you could make one that looks like a small muffler but is mounted further upstream than the actual muffler. It would work fine except when it got plugged up or too hot. An onboard diagnostic system could be cool, too. Some little gadgets, maybe called "oxygen sensors" that turn on the check engine light every thirty thousand miles or so to remind you to bring the car into the dealership to replace the things.
That's my understanding. I've never needed to access the ports separately, but there is a Linux device for "all four switch ports" and several for individual ports. You can assign IP addresses to them in any way that you could a hard drive based Linux box.
A Linksys WRT54G series router with the unlocked OpenWRT firmware can do that. Normally the 4-port switch acts like, well, a switch, but you can access the 4 ports separately with the unlocked firmware. Make sure you get one of the "real" Linux-based routers, though. The latest version of the WRT54G has much less memory and is not capable of running OpenWRT (which is an embedded Linux). Most of the GS versions, all of the GL versions, and an assortment of others can be flashed to OpenWRT.
You're missing an important point with your football analogy. Video games are simulations! I'd feel much safer actually playing football than actually chasing orcs with a spear. Football and quite a few other sports are violent, but they tend to be less violent than warfare, assassination, or street riots. With the possible exception of hockey, anyway... Chess, in principle, is no different from a video game; It's a war simulation, just a much more primitive one than Age of Empires. Except for the realism level, it could also be considered violent, what with the sacrificing of pawns so knights can kill queens and such things.
Of course the video games as simulations comparison breaks down when you consider pac-man. What the heck is that supposed to be simulating, skipping out of an all-you-can-eat buffet without paying your bill?
In fact, I would interpret the presence of spelling or grammatical errors as a hint that you are in fact American! Admittedly, the following anecdote comes from many years ago, but in my highschool German class (in the USA), the teacher gave his students an English quiz early on. His reasoning, which I agree with, is that you can't learn the grammar of a foreign language if you don't understand your own. Without fail, the highest grade on that quiz came from a student who learned English as a second language!
Though there are moral grounds for this decision, it contrasts with a Eurogamer piece on the negative reactions Chinese players recieve on English-speaking servers.
That's a misspelling of receive in the link to an article about non-English speakers being ostracized for their weaker command of the English language. "I before E except after C and all that". Would Zonk himself be shunned as a "gold-farmer" because he can't spell or bother to run his post through a spell-checker?
While I don't play World of Warcraft, I have played other MMORPGs, and grammar and spelling mistakes abound. I interpret them as a hint that the person controlling that character is young, not foreign, though. I've botched spelling in my own posts more than occasionally, mostly from typos and other side effects of my fingers trying to move faster than my brain. Assuming that someone who makes grammatical mistakes is Chinese is silly, and assuming that someone who is Chinese is a squinty-eyed sweatshop slave playing for money is racist!
The National Institute for Media and Family certainly sounds like a religiously-motivated "video games are bad, mmkay?" group with an axe to grind. Anyone reading their report with a critical eye can see that all the studies they cite are honest about how little you can conclude from their evidence. "The kids who play violent video games are more violent than those who don't" could mean "games make kids violent" OR "kids who are already violent tend to play violent games." There's no way to know from the evidence. NIMF's analysis of each study concedes this, but they proceed with their conclusions anyway.
Here's part 2: The rating system does suck. It's incredibly broken. The M rating encompasses a ridiculously large range. Games like the now-infamous GTA: San Andreas, which encourages shooting cops, roughing up prostitutes, selling drugs, and whatever else gets an M. So does the original Halo, which had no profanity, no human on human violence (although plenty of human on alien, I admit), and no rewards for antisocial behavior. But if humans killing aliens gets you an M, would Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 rate an M? How about Combat, which came with the system? It seems that any amount of violence nets you an M rating, but nobody had a problem with 14 year olds playing Combat. Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire are very similar (made by the same guys) and have basically identical amounts of violence and moral issues. JE gets an M, but KOTOR gets a T. Blade II and LOTR: Return of the King are the same deal: The only difference I can see is orcs vs vampires, and lighting; but Blade gets and M, LOTR gets a T. I let my son rent Punisher a while back, which is rated T, but it was full of profanity and violence comparable to Chronicles of Riddick, which gets a well-earned M.
Unfortunately, the "play what they play" argument doesn't work very well either. I try to be an "informed parent", but it's hard. I can't preview the game without cracking the seal on it and making it unreturnable. I can research it on the Net, but the review sites don't tell me how graphic things are, or how much profanity there is, or anything else useful for this purpose. They just tell you how good the game is. I wish I had a solution here, but I don't. How about 10 point scales for Profanity, Violence, and Sex in a scale that's consistent?
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't most air contaminants measured in parts per million or parts per billion? We are talking about picograms per cubic meter. A cubic meter of air weighs around 1 kilogram, so we are talking about 10 to the minus 12 grams per 1000 grams, or 15 decimal places difference. 29 to 850 parts per thousand trillion. I don't even know what comes after trillion! That's a concentration so low that you could find basically anything at that level. Completely meaningless statistic.
Am I the only one who remembers the Saturday morning cartoons from the 80's that were thinly-disguised adds for plastic toys? Transformers and Go-Bots are the ones that come to mind, but I know there were more. Has anybody been stuck in a room with a TV playing Yu-Gi-Oh? It's a show about people playing the card game, although they have some obscure explanation for why the stuff is "really" happening to the characters playing it. Pokemon is another example, but I'm less sure about it because the show might have come before the toys. Somebody must think that kids who grew up on this garbage and didn't recognize it for what it was then won't recognize it when the toys being sold are more complicated.
Sadly, this is almost a necessary evil. The old way of paying for the production of the content with commercial breaks doesn't work so well because DVR's let people skip the commercials entirely. If we want low-cost television programming, we've got to pay for it somehow, and this is one way. The writers' guild clearly hates it, and I don't blame them, but the money has to come from somewhere. The only other option is premium programming like HBO, which not enough people pay for. I'm one of the ones who doesn't pay for it, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that product placement is rampant there too.
I know I'm too many pages down for this to get read, but I'm going to say it anyway. The first and only thing I can think of right now is get rid of this whole enemy combatant thing. Tell the directors of the CIA and any armed forces involved "You have 30 days to reclassify all the enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay and wherever else they're being held. 30 days from now, they will ALL be either charged with a crime and given legal representation, classified prisoners of war and allowed visits by the Red Cross, or set free. Anybody who can not accept these terms has 7 days to give me their resignation. The timer starts now."
I agree completely. I recently migrated from a Palm device that died (Treo 270) to a Blackberry. I almost had to go Windows Mobile for lots more money in order to keep handwriting recognition, but I decided to give Blackberry a try. I still wish I could write on the thing as I think that's a better way, but the Blackberry Pearl's keyboard (2 letters per key) and its guessing software is surprisingly good. I'd still rather have a stylus, but these days handwriting recognition is the only thing that Palm still does well. It's positively archaic next to the offerings from Blackberry and Microsoft. The Linux transition has been rumored for quite a while. Hopefully they have it mostly working now so we'll see something usable in less than 2 years.
Evidence that is obtained by any party that does not follow this rule should be inadmissible!
The tricky thing about pretexting is it's not a "search and seizure" because the person being suckered has every right to refuse. They don't, because they take the pretexter at his word that he is who he claims to be. If a guy shows up at the door claiming to be doing a property survey or something and I let him in, he hasn't broken the law. If I deny him access and he forces his way in, he's broken the law and I'm well within my rights to call the police and/or beat the crap out of him. Unless the house in question is in Texas, where it seems to be state law that I'm required to shoot him instead...
Pretexting is dishonest, slimy, bordering on despicable, and I think should be illegal, but it doesn't actually violate the 4th Amendment.
Like most slashdot readers, IANAL, but the difference between a "licensed investigator" and an "ordinary citizen" is minimal. I don't know what the licensing restrictions are for private detectives and such, but they aren't much. Licensing implies a code of ethics and some oversight by whatever organization regulates the licensee, but there isn't much of that for investigators. Do they even need any law enforcement background? Has a licensed investigator ever lost his license for lying, cheating, abuses of position, or similar?
Maybe Mitnick's Art of Deception or similar should be required reading at the highschool level so more people would catch pretexting attempts.
I wish games like WoW, which we call Role Playing Games, could be renamed to something else. I've played City of Heroes and Dark Age of Camelot, and the problem I have with them is that the interface is too unwieldy for role-playing. A bunch of friends sitting around a table occasionally rolling dice can let their imaginations go because the interface (ie. the table that you can stand up from if necessary) doesn't get in the way. When you have to type to say anything, remember the non-intuitive keystrokes to do anything (particularly in early DAOC), or type an obscure slash command to do anything other than stand or walk there isn't much of an opportunity for pretending to be something else. Since that is the essence of role-playing, you can't role play without it!
The other problem, as mentioned in other posts, is the inherent stability of the virtual world. Much of the thrill of "adventuring" is changing the world, or at least standing above the crowd. With 5 real guys in a living room there's plenty of room for them all to be famous in the virtual world. In an MMORPG all the players have the same opportunity to stand above the crowd, which means that most of them don't. The two games that I've played addressed this in small ways: A DAOC crafter can take pride in his/her repeat customers and the amount of gear out there with his/her name on it, and the custom base raid option in City of Heroes / Villains has some potential, but basically every character in this type of game has to play a subset of the same stories as everybody else.
Maybe MMOCBG (Massively Multiplayer Online Character Building Game) would be a better choice, either for the obvious reason or because suffering supposedly builds character... Or Massively Multiplayer Online Repetitive Metric Increasing Game. Massively Multiplayer Online Repetitive Accounting Game? How about Massively Multiplayer Online Repetitive Procedure Game? That way you wouldn't have to change the acronym!
But there is the second half of that: People are expected to be able to plug in the toaster, load it with bread, and press the start button. Having a WAP figure out how much security you need and which devices are yours (and therefore allowed to connect) would be the equivalent of the toaster that plugs itself and loads itself.
I haven't read it cover to cover or anything, but yes I've seen the inside of it, particularly the scheduled maintenance sections. Of course, I also had to take a class and a driver's test before I was allowed to use the car in the first place. You're right about most people's lack of knowledge about the workings of their car, though. But if they don't check the tires, and they don't designate somebody else to, then they take the consequences of not doing the maintenance: tires wearing out too soon, low mileage, getting stranded by the side of the road, and etc.
There is a one-liner in the article about how most wireless adapters are configured to find open access points. This isn't much more than a hint that it was a wide open network, but it is a hint.
OK, I have to concede your point that "willfully ignorant" is at least informed enough to know that you're ignorant, but I disagree with your car analogy. A car owner is expected to know that you have to put gas in the car if you want it keep running, if the inside is too cold you move this lever from the blue lines to the red lines, that you should put air in the tires occasionally, and take it to a garage for an oil change every three months. Any machine (appliance, electronic, garden tool, garden spade) requires a bit of knowledge to use it properly, and computer equipment is not an exception to this. Some theories of "user friendliness" involve dropping the "computer literacy" to ridiculously low levels. To stretch another analogy, you would expect a toaster to be able to tell when the bread is done, but you wouldn't expect it to be able to plug itself in and get the bread out of the breadbox for you.
You don't need to know what frequency band or collision detection scheme wireless uses in order secure it any more than you need to know how to build a car from scratch in order to check the oil. If somebody can't be bothered to change the defaults of their access point then they don't have the right to complain that somebody else is using it. If you set up WEP and somebody hacks through it that's a different matter, but this was an open network.
Some good ideas here about the cars. The catalyst in the exhaust system could be called a "catalytic converter". I'll bet you could make one that looks like a small muffler but is mounted further upstream than the actual muffler. It would work fine except when it got plugged up or too hot. An onboard diagnostic system could be cool, too. Some little gadgets, maybe called "oxygen sensors" that turn on the check engine light every thirty thousand miles or so to remind you to bring the car into the dealership to replace the things.
That's my understanding. I've never needed to access the ports separately, but there is a Linux device for "all four switch ports" and several for individual ports. You can assign IP addresses to them in any way that you could a hard drive based Linux box.
A Linksys WRT54G series router with the unlocked OpenWRT firmware can do that. Normally the 4-port switch acts like, well, a switch, but you can access the 4 ports separately with the unlocked firmware. Make sure you get one of the "real" Linux-based routers, though. The latest version of the WRT54G has much less memory and is not capable of running OpenWRT (which is an embedded Linux). Most of the GS versions, all of the GL versions, and an assortment of others can be flashed to OpenWRT.
You're missing an important point with your football analogy. Video games are simulations! I'd feel much safer actually playing football than actually chasing orcs with a spear. Football and quite a few other sports are violent, but they tend to be less violent than warfare, assassination, or street riots. With the possible exception of hockey, anyway... Chess, in principle, is no different from a video game; It's a war simulation, just a much more primitive one than Age of Empires. Except for the realism level, it could also be considered violent, what with the sacrificing of pawns so knights can kill queens and such things.
Of course the video games as simulations comparison breaks down when you consider pac-man. What the heck is that supposed to be simulating, skipping out of an all-you-can-eat buffet without paying your bill?
While I don't play World of Warcraft, I have played other MMORPGs, and grammar and spelling mistakes abound. I interpret them as a hint that the person controlling that character is young, not foreign, though. I've botched spelling in my own posts more than occasionally, mostly from typos and other side effects of my fingers trying to move faster than my brain. Assuming that someone who makes grammatical mistakes is Chinese is silly, and assuming that someone who is Chinese is a squinty-eyed sweatshop slave playing for money is racist!
I now yield the soapbox to the next in line...
The National Institute for Media and Family certainly sounds like a religiously-motivated "video games are bad, mmkay?" group with an axe to grind. Anyone reading their report with a critical eye can see that all the studies they cite are honest about how little you can conclude from their evidence. "The kids who play violent video games are more violent than those who don't" could mean "games make kids violent" OR "kids who are already violent tend to play violent games." There's no way to know from the evidence. NIMF's analysis of each study concedes this, but they proceed with their conclusions anyway.
Here's part 2: The rating system does suck. It's incredibly broken. The M rating encompasses a ridiculously large range. Games like the now-infamous GTA: San Andreas, which encourages shooting cops, roughing up prostitutes, selling drugs, and whatever else gets an M. So does the original Halo, which had no profanity, no human on human violence (although plenty of human on alien, I admit), and no rewards for antisocial behavior. But if humans killing aliens gets you an M, would Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 rate an M? How about Combat, which came with the system? It seems that any amount of violence nets you an M rating, but nobody had a problem with 14 year olds playing Combat. Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire are very similar (made by the same guys) and have basically identical amounts of violence and moral issues. JE gets an M, but KOTOR gets a T. Blade II and LOTR: Return of the King are the same deal: The only difference I can see is orcs vs vampires, and lighting; but Blade gets and M, LOTR gets a T. I let my son rent Punisher a while back, which is rated T, but it was full of profanity and violence comparable to Chronicles of Riddick, which gets a well-earned M.
Unfortunately, the "play what they play" argument doesn't work very well either. I try to be an "informed parent", but it's hard. I can't preview the game without cracking the seal on it and making it unreturnable. I can research it on the Net, but the review sites don't tell me how graphic things are, or how much profanity there is, or anything else useful for this purpose. They just tell you how good the game is. I wish I had a solution here, but I don't. How about 10 point scales for Profanity, Violence, and Sex in a scale that's consistent?