When asked about his favorite book Romeny stated "Battlefield Earth" by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
By the way the above post isn't a joke. He actually said his favorite book was "Battlefield Earth."
If we are deciding who to vote on based on the books they read (which is only slightly better than deciding based on how convincingly they can smile on camera) then Romney has just been disqualified as far as I'm concerned... Hubbard is not just the founder of a cult, he is also one bad writer...
..and don't get me started on the movie! ugh... that was the worst movie I was ever conned into paying a theater ticket for (only because I didn't know it was from Hubbard, and because Forest Whitaker was in it). Lessons learned: a) avoid all movies with John Travolta in them, and b) always check from whoose book sci-fi movies come from.
No thanks, I've already got all of the benefits of Google's model of cloud storage... I'll keep using my traditional model of robust "cloud" storage: An editor with auto-save enabled, editing files in a local GIT repo, with a cron job doing git commit & git push every 5 minutes or so. Note: that remote repo -- it's part of my private cloud; I also have a cron job that creates a daily private bittorrent of my media collection -- my other PCs rsync the torrent & use BT to distributively sync the media folders I've selected them to store. Bonus, when I'm offline I still have access to all the important data, and some of whatever entertainment data I'm liking right now.
Wow, hat off to you... though I am not sure if it is for cleverness or for unneeded complexity. I've just set up encfs-over-dropbox synching between my PCs (so dropbox only sees encrypted versions of my files) and I thought I was doing it complicated...
Linux is far worse than Windows in terms of user experience (& complexity). I wouldn't even compare Linux to Windows 7, I would compare Windows 95 to Ubuntu 11, and honestly feel Windows 95 would win that battle.
Are you trolling or are you trolling? Modern linux distros are in many ways ahead of Windows. If you've ever tried showing them to total linux noobs, you will know that there are a few things that make windows users OOH and AAH right away. The first one is the simple way of installing new applications from an app-store-like program (something that has been around far longer than the apple app store). And the fact that right after installation you have a complete system, rather than needing to spend hours after install to download all the missing components from this-and-that dubiously trustworthy website.
Which isn't to say that linux is perfect... i'm sure there are some things windows does better, but comparing modern Ubuntu with Windows 95 only demonstrates your utter clueless-ness. Windows 95 could not connect to the internet without some extra components (no default TCP/IP included!)... Need I say anything else?
>>>"Sergey Brin thinks managing your own computer is 'torture'."
I think Sergey Brin is just off his rocker. I've had Windows XP for almost ten years now, and I don't have to "manage" anything. Every year or so I wipe the drive with a fresh XP-CD install, and need to reinstall my favorite programs, but that would be true of any OS, whether it's Mac, Lubuntu, or Chrome. Otherwise WinXP just works. Like my car. Or my microwave*. Or my stereo.
*
* The lightbulb burned out, but it still works after 20 years.
My older laptop has had ubuntu since 2005, but I have NEVER needed to wipe my entire system and restart from scratch. And that is despite upgrading the OS every 6 months from breezy badger all the way to natty narval... a total of what, 11 upgrades, many of them with major new functionality.
Having to re-wipe every year is NOT normal. It is a major engineering failure, though I'm not sure who specifically is to blame (microsoft? kernel drivers? application developers?).
Unity is also targeted at non-power users and new linux users, who do not have such strongly ingrained habits that resist change.
I'm wondering if you've ever actually talked to a non-power user.
Although this is slashdot, I do have a few friends who are not computer nerds, and have upgraded one of them to unity already. She didn't seem to mind.
The fanbois may be the vocal minority, but if this computer is designed for my mom/grandparents, changing the UI at all is a bad thing.
Not if your mom/grandparents have never used ubuntu anyhow, and the new interface makes the first impact easier.
These are the kinds of users who don't bother learning what they are doing--they learn how to do things.
Finally, moving the x button to the left of windows was the dumbest idea that I can come up with. Yes, mac has their buttons on the left, and it works great for them. However, you'll notice that windows in OSX don't have menu bars--the title bar at the top of the screen changes based on the selected window. Putting the button to close an application a few pixels from the most commonly accessed menu is just begging for bad things to happen (netbook with crappy touchpad:$250. Copy of Ubuntu: $0. The look on someone's face when they realize that they just killed the file they've been working in for the past three hours when they tried to save: Priceless).
You should have seen the look on older relative's face when accidentally swiping the touchpad switched desktops. Of course, he did not know about multiple desktops so he just saw all the windows he was working with disappear... Thankfully that piece of crazy was disabled some time ago.
It obviously vary by country, but I think prepaid phone systems have that policy of not wanting to return your cash. If you dump your money, they are gone.
In Italy the cell-phone companies have been forced to treat money in your prepaid account as real money a few years ago. This means that:
a) they cannot charge you extra money for recharging your account. If you pay 30 euros to get 25 euros credit, that means you end up paying your minutes more than the advertised rates. Not allowed.
b) they have to give you any leftover money back when they close the account.
c) they cannot in practice do promotions where you get free credit with restrictive conditions (as in "Get 100 euros* of credit with your new account". *only valid
for calls done on february 29th and lasting between 13 and 14 minutes). Of course, they can and do use some kind of point system for that as well, but they're not allowed to mislead you by calling it money anymore.
I'm yet to find anybody who like Unity outside of Ubuntu development. Anyone? Anyone at all?
I like it, and I'm not involved in ubuntu. It's sort of beta-quality in some ways (mainly because you can't configure it much yet without going to configuration files), so if you have no enthusiasm for trying the new thing I would wait until the next release. It's only in October after all. Personally I enjoy experimenting with it, and I find it pretty sleek and very responsive. Have upgrade my laptops and will soon upgrade the office desktop as well.
Initially, all changes cause a little confusion, but that does not mean they are bad (like moving the x button to the left of windows... it is neither better nor worse on its own. After a few days you get used to it and it works just as well). Unity is also targeted at non-power users and new linux users, who do not have such strongly ingrained habits that resist change. And for that user segment I think it is successful. If they want to reach 200 million users they need to convince people from the windows/mac world to switch, after all.
While you have a point that many security methods such as passwords rely on 'obscurity', one can still make a distinction between methods which rely on poorly measured (and typically low) entropy and methods which rely on well defined entropy. Usually when people talk about the dangers of security through obscurity, they are talking of the former;...
No. Security by obscurity means security achieved by keeping the details of your system secret (architecture, algorithms, etc), so people don't know how to break in. The accepted way to do security, on the other hand, is to build a system that is secure even against adversaries who know everything about your system, lacking only a well defined credential or set of credentials (a password, certificate, fingerprint, etc).
Using "secret" urls to provide access is not security by obscurity if there is enough randomness involved that urls are practically unguessable, though if it does not go over HTTPs it is certainly weak against certain threat models (Man-in-the-middle).
Well e-mail security is poor but that isn't the point. A URL is not a password and should not be treated as one. It's fairly easy to guess random text strings until you get a hit on these URLs. You will eventually find *something*.
Not really, the random string just needs to be random enough and long enough and it will take you longer than the life of the universe to "find something". Since no user needs to remember it, making it unguessable does not impact usability either. And if you want to make sure it does not become known to a MiTM, just do all the file downloading over HTTPs.
Yes, the web is a mess of technologies taped onto each other, but that doesn't mean there aren't right ways and wrong ways of using it from a security point of view.
A good scapegoat isn't just someone who can take the blame, it's somebody who you're trying to attack or remove for reasons you can't actually state publicly. For instance, if The Boss has to pick between scapegoating Alice or Bob, they might pick on whoever's standing in the way of a plum promotion for their good friend Fred, regardless of whether Alice or Bob had more to do with the problem in the first place. Or if someone from country A attacked country B, if the leaders of country B wanted to attack country C but couldn't come up with a legitimate reason they might try to blame the whole thing on country C rather than country A.
But they had WMDs! Saddam's dandruff was a chemical weapon!....
I think the problem is that if you use a Truecrypt container and back that up to Dropbox, the Dropbox client is not always able to tell if any data has changed as changing the contents of the container does not always change the containers binary size on the disk. This means you can't do an incremental backup and instead have to force a full backup every time you alter what is inside the container, which isn't funny if your container is larger than a few hundred MBs.
True, but then in depends on the granularity of your container. A single truecrypt volume is not a good idea. But there are also per-file encryption solutions available. Ecryptfs is what ubuntu uses for the Private folder which is available by default. It encrpyts each file individually, with file name unchanged. So unless the name of your files is sensitive, you can use it to at least have per-file updates to dropbox. Encfs does something simlar but it also protects the file name.
I liked the way the Watchmen did it. It started out with the characters in place and we only learned of their origins (not even all of them) through their own flashbacks with their own voice-overs. We never learn how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is their own self-serving version of their origins. It was not only simple and effective, it also gave a lot of insight into how these superheroes saw themselves.
50% market share isn't that bad is it? For a long time after DVDs came out VHS was still selling and renting well. Most people I know (including my parents) upgraded to Blu-Ray shortly after getting a >40" LCD.
50% of new players is not so impressive. It's not 50% of movies. Probably not even close. I mean, if you are buying a new player, bluray is more expensive but not exhorbitantly so. So if half the buyers choose to go for dvd it really means bluray is not a features that is highly valued by users.
Personally, I intentionally bought a laptop with no spinning stuff of any kind*, and I don't have a screen big enough to really appreciate HD, so I couldn't care less about overpriced, DRM-infested pieces of plastic.
but the BRICS by themselves are unlikely to to be able to drive that change.
However a recent Bloomberg article pointed out that China is now Germany's #1 client, replacing the US which has held that position almost since WW2.
Yes but the chinese currency is unusable as a reserve currency since you are not free to convert to and from it at will. Unless China lets its currencty float and be traded and converted outside its control, it will never be a reserve currency, even if China had one half of the world's GDP.
You are free to believe in copying and preach about it all you want, but if you break the law, you will still get cuffed and jailed.
A cult may believe in human sacrifice or slavery or under-aged marriage or the execution of homosexuals. Thank god (or gov to be more accurate) it has never given them the right to do it.
Then why can churches discriminate in ways that would get any other business or organization in huge trouble? Let's see, how many female priests does your church have? Have they fired priests for coming out as homosexuals? Think that is legal?
Just to clarify, in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick: I'm of the firm opinion that everyone should be able to say and believe absolutely what the hell they like, and those rights should be protected indiscriminately for all, but the problems start occurring when you offer religious organisations tax breaks, exemptions from laws applied to other organisations, and so forth.
Exactly. I think we should not offer religions tax breaks. And to be fair, we should also not allow them to break laws. For instance it would make perfect sense to slap fines on churches that have no female priests for discriminating based on sex. In practice we may prefer to live and let live and let the matter lie, but it remains disturbing that if enough people believe something to get a religion status it suddenly becomes legal, even if it is clearly both illegal and unethical.
this shouldn't be possible and regulation is a good way of addressing this, for example by forbidding businesses from using SSNs as record identifiers
Governments are very two-faced on this one, on the one hand they get their panties in a bunch about it yet on the other hand they require it in so many places. Here in Norway I have a unique id assigned to me by the government. Employers report income to the authorities for income tax, so all HR positions have to have it. I can't open a bank account without one. I can't trade stocks or funds without one. Car registry, property registry, pretty much every registry that requires a unique id uses it. There's a central registry that I have to report in when I move, so I get all the local voting rights, pay the right local taxes and so on. Even the card that gives me 3% off at the grocery store and pays out when it reaches a certain amount has to have that ID, because even those 20$ are reported to the government as my asset. Along with audit requirements that means many, many people past and present have to know it. That it's also written on my drivers license in my wallet is the least of my worries. Of course the explanations are all the usual ones, tax fraud, money laundering, mistaken identities and so on. Fair enough but you can't both have your cake and eat it too, if so many people know it then it's not a very well kept secret.
It's not a secret, well kept or otherwise, anymore than your date of birth is. But I am pretty sure that someone cannot create a bank account or get a credit card in your name just because he has found out that non-secret number. The problem they have in the US is that with no national id and with many people not having a passport, companies resort to all sorts of bizarre things to identify people (including the social security number, which was never meant for that purpose, or absurdities like your mother's maiden name, or an electricity bill delivered to your address).
What is porn? Who gets to decide the answer to that question?
Porn is anything you lose interest in after orgasm. And yes, that is a very subjective definition. I sincerely hope it doesn't include your significant other.
My number 1 missing feature in Java is the ability to set object references to be 'copy on write'.
I'm doing numerical/scientific programming. Say I have an object which contains an array, and a 'get' function to return that array. Currently I have two choices: I can return a pointer to my object's array, or make a copy of the array and return that.
Returning a pointer is very fast, but now my class is at the mercy of callers which might write into my array. Returning a copy is safe, but so long as the callers behave themselves and don't try to write to it, is a waste of time and memory. If I could return a "copy-on-write-reference" to my array, I'd get the best of both worlds.
Any reference reached via a copy-on-write-reference would also need to be copy-on-write. If you make copy-on-write a qualifier on a variable, this could be all enforced by the compiler.
Are there any languages which do something like this?
You don't need the compiler to know about copy-on-write. To write a generic copy-on-write pointer class it is enough to have a compiler that knows about const-ness, as well as operator overloading that also allows overloading pointer operations (dereference..). Both features are available in C++, and in fact some implementations of STL string have used copy-on-write. Like reference-counting, performance becomes horrible with multiple threads because of the extra locks that are then needed.
Installing a keylogger that also does screen captures to "monitor the performance" of their laptops would be like a homebuilder installing secret video cameras all over your house that relay the pictures back to him telling you he needs to "monitor the performance" of the house.
At least if he said he wants to monitor the performances of your wife he would be more honest...
Let them know their behavior isn't appropriate. Don't buy their product, and let everyone you know why you don't recommend buying their product.
I have a samsung laptop, but I don't really care what crapware, spyware, malware, or evilware they installed on top of the windows installation, as I use linux. So long as they don't do it in the bios or the hardware or something I don't care.
Disclaimer: before someone flames, yes, this is evil, just doesn't affect me atm. You know, first they came for the...
Slashdot Mirror
When asked about his favorite book Romeny stated "Battlefield Earth" by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
By the way the above post isn't a joke. He actually said his favorite book was "Battlefield Earth."
If we are deciding who to vote on based on the books they read (which is only slightly better than deciding based on how convincingly they can smile on camera) then Romney has just been disqualified as far as I'm concerned... Hubbard is not just the founder of a cult, he is also one bad writer...
..and don't get me started on the movie! ugh... that was the worst movie I was ever conned into paying a theater ticket for (only because I didn't know it was from Hubbard, and because Forest Whitaker was in it). Lessons learned: a) avoid all movies with John Travolta in them, and b) always check from whoose book sci-fi movies come from.
No thanks, I've already got all of the benefits of Google's model of cloud storage... I'll keep using my traditional model of robust "cloud" storage: An editor with auto-save enabled, editing files in a local GIT repo, with a cron job doing git commit & git push every 5 minutes or so. Note: that remote repo -- it's part of my private cloud; I also have a cron job that creates a daily private bittorrent of my media collection -- my other PCs rsync the torrent & use BT to distributively sync the media folders I've selected them to store. Bonus, when I'm offline I still have access to all the important data, and some of whatever entertainment data I'm liking right now.
Wow, hat off to you... though I am not sure if it is for cleverness or for unneeded complexity. I've just set up encfs-over-dropbox synching between my PCs (so dropbox only sees encrypted versions of my files) and I thought I was doing it complicated...
Linux is far worse than Windows in terms of user experience (& complexity). I wouldn't even compare Linux to Windows 7, I would compare Windows 95 to Ubuntu 11, and honestly feel Windows 95 would win that battle.
Are you trolling or are you trolling? Modern linux distros are in many ways ahead of Windows. If you've ever tried showing them to total linux noobs, you will know that there are a few things that make windows users OOH and AAH right away. The first one is the simple way of installing new applications from an app-store-like program (something that has been around far longer than the apple app store). And the fact that right after installation you have a complete system, rather than needing to spend hours after install to download all the missing components from this-and-that dubiously trustworthy website.
Which isn't to say that linux is perfect... i'm sure there are some things windows does better, but comparing modern Ubuntu with Windows 95 only demonstrates your utter clueless-ness. Windows 95 could not connect to the internet without some extra components (no default TCP/IP included!)... Need I say anything else?
>>>"Sergey Brin thinks managing your own computer is 'torture'."
I think Sergey Brin is just off his rocker. I've had Windows XP for almost ten years now, and I don't have to "manage" anything. Every year or so I wipe the drive with a fresh XP-CD install, and need to reinstall my favorite programs, but that would be true of any OS, whether it's Mac, Lubuntu, or Chrome. Otherwise WinXP just works. Like my car. Or my microwave*. Or my stereo.
* * The lightbulb burned out, but it still works after 20 years.
My older laptop has had ubuntu since 2005, but I have NEVER needed to wipe my entire system and restart from scratch. And that is despite upgrading the OS every 6 months from breezy badger all the way to natty narval... a total of what, 11 upgrades, many of them with major new functionality.
Having to re-wipe every year is NOT normal. It is a major engineering failure, though I'm not sure who specifically is to blame (microsoft? kernel drivers? application developers?).
Unity is also targeted at non-power users and new linux users, who do not have such strongly ingrained habits that resist change.
I'm wondering if you've ever actually talked to a non-power user.
Although this is slashdot, I do have a few friends who are not computer nerds, and have upgraded one of them to unity already. She didn't seem to mind.
The fanbois may be the vocal minority, but if this computer is designed for my mom/grandparents, changing the UI at all is a bad thing.
Not if your mom/grandparents have never used ubuntu anyhow, and the new interface makes the first impact easier.
These are the kinds of users who don't bother learning what they are doing--they learn how to do things.
Finally, moving the x button to the left of windows was the dumbest idea that I can come up with. Yes, mac has their buttons on the left, and it works great for them. However, you'll notice that windows in OSX don't have menu bars--the title bar at the top of the screen changes based on the selected window. Putting the button to close an application a few pixels from the most commonly accessed menu is just begging for bad things to happen (netbook with crappy touchpad:$250. Copy of Ubuntu: $0. The look on someone's face when they realize that they just killed the file they've been working in for the past three hours when they tried to save: Priceless).
You should have seen the look on older relative's face when accidentally swiping the touchpad switched desktops. Of course, he did not know about multiple desktops so he just saw all the windows he was working with disappear... Thankfully that piece of crazy was disabled some time ago.
...I've lost the bleeps, I lost the sweeps, and I lost the creeps.
It obviously vary by country, but I think prepaid phone systems have that policy of not wanting to return your cash. If you dump your money, they are gone.
In Italy the cell-phone companies have been forced to treat money in your prepaid account as real money a few years ago. This means that:
a) they cannot charge you extra money for recharging your account. If you pay 30 euros to get 25 euros credit, that means you end up paying your minutes more than the advertised rates. Not allowed.
b) they have to give you any leftover money back when they close the account.
c) they cannot in practice do promotions where you get free credit with restrictive conditions (as in "Get 100 euros* of credit with your new account". *only valid for calls done on february 29th and lasting between 13 and 14 minutes). Of course, they can and do use some kind of point system for that as well, but they're not allowed to mislead you by calling it money anymore.
aint gonna be drinking that koolaid.
gonna look for an alternative.
I'm yet to find anybody who like Unity outside of Ubuntu development. Anyone? Anyone at all?
I like it, and I'm not involved in ubuntu. It's sort of beta-quality in some ways (mainly because you can't configure it much yet without going to configuration files), so if you have no enthusiasm for trying the new thing I would wait until the next release. It's only in October after all. Personally I enjoy experimenting with it, and I find it pretty sleek and very responsive. Have upgrade my laptops and will soon upgrade the office desktop as well.
Initially, all changes cause a little confusion, but that does not mean they are bad (like moving the x button to the left of windows... it is neither better nor worse on its own. After a few days you get used to it and it works just as well). Unity is also targeted at non-power users and new linux users, who do not have such strongly ingrained habits that resist change. And for that user segment I think it is successful. If they want to reach 200 million users they need to convince people from the windows/mac world to switch, after all.
While you have a point that many security methods such as passwords rely on 'obscurity', one can still make a distinction between methods which rely on poorly measured (and typically low) entropy and methods which rely on well defined entropy. Usually when people talk about the dangers of security through obscurity, they are talking of the former;...
No. Security by obscurity means security achieved by keeping the details of your system secret (architecture, algorithms, etc), so people don't know how to break in. The accepted way to do security, on the other hand, is to build a system that is secure even against adversaries who know everything about your system, lacking only a well defined credential or set of credentials (a password, certificate, fingerprint, etc).
Using "secret" urls to provide access is not security by obscurity if there is enough randomness involved that urls are practically unguessable, though if it does not go over HTTPs it is certainly weak against certain threat models (Man-in-the-middle).
Well e-mail security is poor but that isn't the point. A URL is not a password and should not be treated as one. It's fairly easy to guess random text strings until you get a hit on these URLs. You will eventually find *something*.
Not really, the random string just needs to be random enough and long enough and it will take you longer than the life of the universe to "find something". Since no user needs to remember it, making it unguessable does not impact usability either. And if you want to make sure it does not become known to a MiTM, just do all the file downloading over HTTPs.
Yes, the web is a mess of technologies taped onto each other, but that doesn't mean there aren't right ways and wrong ways of using it from a security point of view.
- find a scapegoat.
A good scapegoat isn't just someone who can take the blame, it's somebody who you're trying to attack or remove for reasons you can't actually state publicly. For instance, if The Boss has to pick between scapegoating Alice or Bob, they might pick on whoever's standing in the way of a plum promotion for their good friend Fred, regardless of whether Alice or Bob had more to do with the problem in the first place. Or if someone from country A attacked country B, if the leaders of country B wanted to attack country C but couldn't come up with a legitimate reason they might try to blame the whole thing on country C rather than country A.
But they had WMDs! Saddam's dandruff was a chemical weapon!....
I think the problem is that if you use a Truecrypt container and back that up to Dropbox, the Dropbox client is not always able to tell if any data has changed as changing the contents of the container does not always change the containers binary size on the disk. This means you can't do an incremental backup and instead have to force a full backup every time you alter what is inside the container, which isn't funny if your container is larger than a few hundred MBs.
True, but then in depends on the granularity of your container. A single truecrypt volume is not a good idea. But there are also per-file encryption solutions available. Ecryptfs is what ubuntu uses for the Private folder which is available by default. It encrpyts each file individually, with file name unchanged. So unless the name of your files is sensitive, you can use it to at least have per-file updates to dropbox. Encfs does something simlar but it also protects the file name.
I liked the way the Watchmen did it. It started out with the characters in place and we only learned of their origins (not even all of them) through their own flashbacks with their own voice-overs. We never learn how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is their own self-serving version of their origins. It was not only simple and effective, it also gave a lot of insight into how these superheroes saw themselves.
You should read the comic.
50% market share isn't that bad is it? For a long time after DVDs came out VHS was still selling and renting well. Most people I know (including my parents) upgraded to Blu-Ray shortly after getting a >40" LCD.
50% of new players is not so impressive. It's not 50% of movies. Probably not even close. I mean, if you are buying a new player, bluray is more expensive but not exhorbitantly so. So if half the buyers choose to go for dvd it really means bluray is not a features that is highly valued by users.
Personally, I intentionally bought a laptop with no spinning stuff of any kind*, and I don't have a screen big enough to really appreciate HD, so I couldn't care less about overpriced, DRM-infested pieces of plastic.
* not quite true unfortunately: it has a fan....
but the BRICS by themselves are unlikely to to be able to drive that change.
However a recent Bloomberg article pointed out that China is now Germany's #1 client, replacing the US which has held that position almost since WW2.
Yes but the chinese currency is unusable as a reserve currency since you are not free to convert to and from it at will. Unless China lets its currencty float and be traded and converted outside its control, it will never be a reserve currency, even if China had one half of the world's GDP.
You are free to believe in copying and preach about it all you want, but if you break the law, you will still get cuffed and jailed.
A cult may believe in human sacrifice or slavery or under-aged marriage or the execution of homosexuals. Thank god (or gov to be more accurate) it has never given them the right to do it.
Then why can churches discriminate in ways that would get any other business or organization in huge trouble? Let's see, how many female priests does your church have? Have they fired priests for coming out as homosexuals? Think that is legal?
Oh please, 90% of the people who copy things haven't built anything, much less something that could be described as magnificent.
100% of people who build things are built on copies. Ever heard of DNA? That's what the grandparent poster was referring to.
Just to clarify, in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick: I'm of the firm opinion that everyone should be able to say and believe absolutely what the hell they like, and those rights should be protected indiscriminately for all, but the problems start occurring when you offer religious organisations tax breaks, exemptions from laws applied to other organisations, and so forth.
Exactly. I think we should not offer religions tax breaks. And to be fair, we should also not allow them to break laws. For instance it would make perfect sense to slap fines on churches that have no female priests for discriminating based on sex. In practice we may prefer to live and let live and let the matter lie, but it remains disturbing that if enough people believe something to get a religion status it suddenly becomes legal, even if it is clearly both illegal and unethical.
this shouldn't be possible and regulation is a good way of addressing this, for example by forbidding businesses from using SSNs as record identifiers
Governments are very two-faced on this one, on the one hand they get their panties in a bunch about it yet on the other hand they require it in so many places. Here in Norway I have a unique id assigned to me by the government. Employers report income to the authorities for income tax, so all HR positions have to have it. I can't open a bank account without one. I can't trade stocks or funds without one. Car registry, property registry, pretty much every registry that requires a unique id uses it. There's a central registry that I have to report in when I move, so I get all the local voting rights, pay the right local taxes and so on. Even the card that gives me 3% off at the grocery store and pays out when it reaches a certain amount has to have that ID, because even those 20$ are reported to the government as my asset. Along with audit requirements that means many, many people past and present have to know it. That it's also written on my drivers license in my wallet is the least of my worries. Of course the explanations are all the usual ones, tax fraud, money laundering, mistaken identities and so on. Fair enough but you can't both have your cake and eat it too, if so many people know it then it's not a very well kept secret.
It's not a secret, well kept or otherwise, anymore than your date of birth is. But I am pretty sure that someone cannot create a bank account or get a credit card in your name just because he has found out that non-secret number. The problem they have in the US is that with no national id and with many people not having a passport, companies resort to all sorts of bizarre things to identify people (including the social security number, which was never meant for that purpose, or absurdities like your mother's maiden name, or an electricity bill delivered to your address).
We need an alternative DNS setup away from parasitic organizations. Actually we need an alternative internet away from parasitic organizations.
Why stop there? We need an alternate world away from parasitic organizations...
What is porn? Who gets to decide the answer to that question?
Porn is anything you lose interest in after orgasm. And yes, that is a very subjective definition. I sincerely hope it doesn't include your significant other.
My number 1 missing feature in Java is the ability to set object references to be 'copy on write'.
I'm doing numerical/scientific programming. Say I have an object which contains an array, and a 'get' function to return that array. Currently I have two choices: I can return a pointer to my object's array, or make a copy of the array and return that.
Returning a pointer is very fast, but now my class is at the mercy of callers which might write into my array. Returning a copy is safe, but so long as the callers behave themselves and don't try to write to it, is a waste of time and memory. If I could return a "copy-on-write-reference" to my array, I'd get the best of both worlds.
Any reference reached via a copy-on-write-reference would also need to be copy-on-write. If you make copy-on-write a qualifier on a variable, this could be all enforced by the compiler.
Are there any languages which do something like this?
You don't need the compiler to know about copy-on-write. To write a generic copy-on-write pointer class it is enough to have a compiler that knows about const-ness, as well as operator overloading that also allows overloading pointer operations (dereference..). Both features are available in C++, and in fact some implementations of STL string have used copy-on-write. Like reference-counting, performance becomes horrible with multiple threads because of the extra locks that are then needed.
Installing a keylogger that also does screen captures to "monitor the performance" of their laptops would be like a homebuilder installing secret video cameras all over your house that relay the pictures back to him telling you he needs to "monitor the performance" of the house.
At least if he said he wants to monitor the performances of your wife he would be more honest...
but this seems like something that needs verification before we grab the torches and pitchforks.
This is slashdot! Put on your tin foil hat and grab your pitchfork like a good slashdottie now...
Let them know their behavior isn't appropriate. Don't buy their product, and let everyone you know why you don't recommend buying their product.
I have a samsung laptop, but I don't really care what crapware, spyware, malware, or evilware they installed on top of the windows installation, as I use linux. So long as they don't do it in the bios or the hardware or something I don't care.
Disclaimer: before someone flames, yes, this is evil, just doesn't affect me atm. You know, first they came for the...