Traffic accidents kill more people than natural disasters by orders of magnitude, and "lifestyle" diseases such as cancer and heart disease dwarf all else.
The problem is, admitting that traffic accidents are a major killer means that we have to admit the majority of people are terrible drivers. Then we'd have to look at why most people are terrible drivers...
Well lets just say this has already been done, and the the results weren't good. It required most people to change their driving habits dramatically and it was a lot easier for them to just accept the deaths and hope they weren't amongst them whilst making up a revenue conspiracy to make ignoring the data more palatable.
Who has a two ton car? In Europe I see lots of larger cars and even smaller ones are over a ton and most are Diesels which pollute pretty badly as well. A MKV VW Golf weighs a ton and a half (2900 lbs). Besides the discussion is around pollution and a small car or scooter or motorcycle is not necessarily less polluting than a big car.
A VW Golf GTI VI at 1360 KG, so a fair bit off a ton and a half (that 1500 KG if you dont understand basic metric measurements).
And a Golf is not a small car by Australian standards, let alone European standards. A Toyota Corolla weighs in at 1290 KG, lets compare this to actual small cars like a Fiat Punto (1024 KG) or a Nissan Micra (942 KG) and then lets pick a smallish American car, the 6cyl Chrysler 300C, weighing in at a paltry 1820 KG.
A BMW 330d weights 1540 KG and a Nissan Skyline 370 GT weights 1600 KG, both 3 to 4 L V6's with more power than the Chrysler (not to mention better transmissions, suspension and use a lot less fuel).
A hundred KG's makes a bit of difference. A lightweight sports car like a Mazda MX-5 (Miata) weighs around 1100 KG. Something like an SUV gets over 2000 KG with almost no trouble, a BMW X5 = 2044KG and the X5 is a lightweight, even a small Holden/Opel/Vauxhall/Chevy Captiva 7 SUV weighs in at 1680 KG in it's lightest form (1850 KG if you want a V6 or turbo diesel) and the lightest Land Rover Discovery 4 is 2495 KG. Consider the popularity of big SUV's in the US, it's not hard to say there are quite a few a 2 ton cars on the road.
Forcing someone to work in the same space as someone else is psychologically stressful no matter how fine you are with it.
You think that's bad? When the company I work for sends 2 same-sex employees off for any sort of training or event, they only spring for 1 hotel room.
I haven't found much in my career that's more unsettling than having to split a bedroom/shitter with someone who is, essentially, a complete stranger.
LLLLLuxury.
That's not cheap. Cheap is when they don't send you for any training that isn't free.
My last employer wouldn't spring for training due to the fact I was a contractor (fair enough) but the job before that was a full time position. Training was all self directed, I had to buy all resources myself (meaning I had to buy a course book and read it, if they didn't get a tax break for time I put down as "training" I would have had to do that in my own time too) and then take the test which I had to pay for and I'd get reimbursed only if I passed and it was useful to the company. That's cheap, your example is merely an annoyance.
Decent headphones make open plan offices bearable.
I wonder if it's an extrovert/introvert thing.
I don't like listening to music whilst working, its a distraction. I also don't like earplugs or other forms of hearing protection that block out noise (my ears end up covered in sweat, which is uncomfortable.
I like working in quiet areas, I can happily tolerate and filter out a certain level of background noise but open plan offices mean I have to listen to the vapid conversations of all the stupid people I inevitably have to sit near. In one of my previous jobs they put me right next to sales. I've lost count of the number of times I had to tell them to shut up because I couldn't hear my client (who expects me to fix their problems). Conversations about boring weekends, kids, cats, whatever crazy religion they've started following, almost nothing work related (not that sales and marketing do actual work). All of it driving me nuts when I've got a complex problem the client wants fixed 20 minutes ago.
So I'd rather be in a nice sensible cube farm. If anyone wants to talk to me they can use IM, email, the phone or just come to my cube. If I need the entire team, we'll go into a meeting room and when I need to get down to work I can be relatively isolated from distractions in my cube.
I also don't buy that whole collaboration thing. Open plan is nothing more than a tax dodge. A full sized partition is considered a wall (part of the building) and is depreciated over 40 years. Smaller partitions are considered furniture and depreciated in a much shorter time (3 years in Oz).
Lots of sites won't make it easy to use passwords that are secure, user friendly, and somewhat unique. I have a financial services account that I can't change that allows 6-8 alphanumeric characters beginning with a letter, no spaces or other special characters. Education has to go both ways.
I agree,
The problem isn't with the sites for the most part, rather it's with the software (I.E. Microsoft's idea of what makes a strong password is firmly locked in the 90's) as most sites and organisations are limited by the settings their software has by default. However what I meant is it's entirely possible to make a complex, somewhat unique and hard to crack password that fits in with the description that you describe and all you have to remember is Bob4. You simply repeat Bob4 three times to produce Bob4Bob4Bob4, meeting your sites requirements and being simple to remember. Obviously you can pick your own 3 or 4 letter word and number.
That's a really cool thought experiment. Frankly I've always thought the rise of self driving cars would just make a world of taxis. You call a car on your "smart device" get in, it takes you wherever, you get off and it goes on to its next customer. Should be ultra, fantastically cheap and efficient, and you just make the interior able to be power hosed down every four hours. Or maybe a nicer automated cleaning for the "better" services.
I highly doubt self driving cars will become like taxi's. Definitely not in the short term because people will still own their own self driving car and organising a municipal fleet is expensive and fraught with bureaucracy (especially if it's done by the private sector, the politics of it will be even worse than city/state politics). Maybe in the long term but it would require a significant shift in the way we think about transportation in our society or for individual cars to become so expensive that owning one is something only the rich can afford.
Automated taxis will operate like traditional taxi's except that the driver will speak English and smell slightly better. So people will still want to own their own cars as they don't want to wait 45 minutes for a peak period taxi. There will still be long waits because you have a majority of the city wanting to move at the same time and a limited number of taxis. On this subject, automated cars are not a magic bullet for traffic congestion because it doesn't actually remove cars from the road.
No it hasn't. In 1960, 5.3% of black babies were born out of wedlock. In 2012 it was 69%. We can "blame society" for many of the problems, due to misguided social policies on the left, and massive expansion of prisons on the right, but there is still plenty of additional blame to heap on the individuals for their own bad choices.
In 1960 if you knocked up a 16 yr old girl, her dad made you marry her at gunpoint.
In 2012, if you knock up a 16 yr old girl, you get counseling whilst she goes on 16 and pregnant.
Marriage is a terrible metric for teen pregnancy considering fewer people in this age are actually getting married and those that do are generally getting married later in life. Now I think that teen pregnancy is actually lower today than in 1960 simply because there is more emphasis on contraception and sexual education.
As for blaming society, people are ultimately the product of the society they live in. Trying to push the blame solely onto individuals is a cop out. If you don't take measures to improve society, you cant expect individuals to better themselves en mass. When a lot of individuals from the same area or socioeconomic background make the same mistakes, you can almost always trace this back to their education (or lack their of), which makes is a social issue.
why they fuck does my email have the ability and the use of a stronger password system than my bank? Not talking about making 255 charter high ascii stuff here just minimum length, with the ability to toss a ? or a { in the mix...
I'd be asking why your bank isn't using 2 factor authentication.
If anyone gets my banking username and password all they can do is look at my modest bank account. If they try to do anything then the bank sends a one time code to my phone via SMS and they cant do anything without that code. They cant even read my transaction history without a one time code.
I'm sure there are some pedantic/.ers rubbing their hands with glee telling me how this system is flawed, yep, I'm sure it's got flaws but it's a hell of a lot more secure than just a username and password. A thief now has to get my username and password _AND_ steal my phone or know me well enough to fraudulently transfer my phone no into their name (which is getting harder and harder for letterbox thieves as I have few paper bills now days).
This is also why I dont use banking apps. They store details and many banks emphatically trust them. So all a thief has to do is swipe my phone and they get full access... If I used them that is. Web sites work just as well (often have more functionality too) and mr phone thief only gets my aging handset and what little credit is left on there.
One of the reasons (one, it's a complex topic) is that we, the security professionals, are too dense to properly explain things in a language the user understands correctly.
You've got this so backwards its not funny.
It's that the average user is so dense that they cant understand the security professional and they're also so lazy that they wont learn or even take basic self preservation measures unless their forced to. The average end user would still be accepting candy from strangers well into their golden years if it wasn't drilled into them from the age of 2.
If you hadn't been so obnoxious I could have given you credit about understanding that few security professionals understand how to talk to users, but you have gotten it so horribly backwards I cant even credit you with this.
Security professionals do need to learn how to communicate with the average user, but this means they need to dumb down, not dumb up.
Maybe, you know, the problem is in the method. Passwords suck..
Maybe you'd like to suggest a better form of authentication that isn't easily forged (fingerprints), easily stolen (swipe cards), horribly insecure (personal details), horribly intrusive (sub dermal implants) or stupidly time consuming/expensive (DNA tests).
Again, you're dead wrong. Passwords are fine for their intended purpose, people are not. Passwords, even simple passwords like 123456 are most vulnerable to social attacks. Your biggest problem are people and the fact they don't take security seriously.
That's a social problem - one best solved via social means. Like disciplinary action via management.
Or education, it is possible to produce passwords that are both secure, user friendly and somewhat unique.
For most organisations I think phishing is the biggest problem, even if they haven't got it stuck on a sticky note on their monitor (I've been telling people to put it on the inside of the back cover of a book instead) a lot of people are still dumb enough to give it to Fred from Microsoft (who happens to have a thick accent) who calls them out of the blue.
Trust me, it's being paid for by everyone (including the one getting the "free" healthcare) - but the costs are hidden in your taxes.
You say that like it's not also true without socialized or universal heathcare. The only difference is that the costs are hidden in taxes, unpaid debt, and lost productivity instead of merely taxes. Or did you think all those unpaid medical bills just disappeared?
Actually with universal health care, it's less hidden than without as the government has to publish budgets and activity statements explaining where the money went. No-one in the private sector has the same level of accountability.
This is how we know exactly how much public health care in Australia cost and how, per person it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the cheapest private health cover in the US.
Fever is one of your body's ways to fight infection. When you supress it, you "enable the virus."
But I will take antipyretics when I damn well feel like it. Tough shit if someone else gets sick.
DARWIN, BABY!
Whether you're taking medication or not, when you've got the flu it's only getting plenty of fluids and rest that will hasten your recovery.
But as a god damned common courtesy, when I'm sick I'll stay home away from others so I dont pass it on, regardless of whether I've taken any cold and flu meds.
Funny, in North America, people get so few vacation/sick days that they feel they have to use up all of both. People will often call in sick when they really just want a vacation day. People think it's their duty to use up all their sick days, whether they are actually sick or not. And then they wonder why the quota for sick days is so low....
In Australia employers (20 days paid annual leave + 10 paid sick days) an employer is legally entitled to ask for a medical certificate from a doctor when an employee takes sick leave but a lot of employers have just renamed sick leave as "personal leave" and generally don't require a medical certificate unless you've taken a chunk of it at once. They did this because a lot of people have to take the day off for personal appointments (lawyers, banks et al. who don't work weekends) or to look after kids/significant other/dependents (carers leave).
It depends on your employer, but being an arse about it is generally frowned upon and even though you wont get in trouble with the law, you'll find you can only get idiots and layabouts working for you as the good staff are working for companies that aren't bastards.
I realize this seems like sound advice, but it genuinely isn't, unless you're prepared for it in advance.
You may have heard of delivery.
Even in Western Australia (still stuck in the early 90's), supermarkets deliver as do Pizza and fish and chip shops.
Beyond this, going down to the shop is not going to kill anyone, least of all you (if it is that bad, you need to get to a hospital).
So unless you're a 75+ yr old with mobility issues, no friends or family and enough irrational paranoia to not own a phone you'll be fine with the flu (however if you're 75+, you probably should still see a doctor).
Who in hell thought it was a good idea to use a system where a single piece of information, consisting of just a few bytes, gives someone a blank check to my bank account? There are innumerable ways to concoct something more secure than this, especially these days when computing power (to do encryption) is ubiquitous. Such methods are of course not bulletproof, but they're a hell of a lot better than a guy with a pair of binoculars stealing credit card numbers, or what happened at Target.
That was the old security system, they've made it even worse since adding NFC. They dont even need access to your card to get enough information to use it without your knowledge or permission. There's even an app for it for any Android phone with NFC https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samj.CardTest&hl=en
NFC on phones have no range due to low power but NFC has max range of 5 metres, so it's just a matter building the right antenna. Even though you wont get the max range of 5 metres, even a radius of 1 metre is enough in a crowded shop.
Also anyone who believes the bank will simply adsorb the cost of the fraud instead of passing it onto you and merchants who'll just pass it back to you (banks are likely to use the merchants, they don't have a choice but to suck up additional fees and look like the bad guy raising prices), well, I have a bridge to sell you.
The fact that we have had so many totalitarian "communist" countries is simply because
Labeling something you dont like as communist has been incredibly popular over the last 60 odd years.
Very few of the so called communist countries are actually communist. Even China is only really communist by name. "Communism" has become little more than a dark specter used in propaganda and most people these days couldn't identify real communism of their lives depended on it.
I guess I am spoiled. I grew up in Conservative Texas, where the communist TXU provided power, cheaper and more reliably than anywhere else in the US. Though power in TX went to shit when they privatized.
Same story with Australian states that went the same way. I'm in one of the lucky states where the power distribution utility was corpratised, so no longer under direct govt control but still has no profit motive. States that went for full privatisation ended up with horrible power bills.
Private companies that had capped profits is what brought us AT&T and the insurance industry.
Corpratised entities aren't technically private. They're more like non-profit organisations that have to provide a service. At the very worst, they have to turn over their profit to the government.
The real solution for the "natural monopoly" is to have the infrastructure owned by the government, and providers buy service from there. It works great for mobile service in Europe (or did, until privatization took hold, and the assets were sold off below market, and the profits were lost and service got worse.
It doesn't even have to be the government, rather it's an entity that has no commercial interests in the infrastructure they're providing. This can be done by making the wholesale provider a completely separate corporate entity from retail providers (and preventing the wholesale provider from being a retail provider).
A government service like a infrastructure provider can be corporatised and run on it's own $0 profit mandate without govt interference. They only have to make enough to meet costs (incl. expansion costs).
Free market, bitches! Suck it you socialist faggots!
Free market means exactly that - if the vendors do something despicable the customers stop doing business with them and choose other vendors who won't do similarly despicable things to them.
And that's exactly why the free market doesn't work.
It relies upon:
1. Customers being smart and savvy enough to realise a vendor is being despicable and rational enough to walk away.
2. That at least one vendor isn't doing despicable things.
1 fails because people are irrational and emotional creatures. Not only do a lot of people not realise they're getting ripped off or taken for a ride, a lot will actually defend it because they get emotionally invested in something (there are a lot of fanboys).
2 has entire industries of examples as to why it fails. Collusion becomes a lot easier when there are no pesky laws preventing it, collusion becomes easy on a massive scale.
The auto makers may not realize it, but they DO get money from used car sales. People sell their old car to get money to put toward a new one.
I agree with you, I couldn't agree more but the car manufacturers don't agree.
They're a lot like the music industry, every time you buy a used BMW, you're depriving BMW of revenue. The only difference is that laws in many nations (including Germany) prevent them from putting in a "DRM" like control into the engine or other vital hardware, however nothing stops them from doing it with optional equipment (I.E. the stereo uses a non standard slot and socket, charges for GPS updates, sound deadening is designed to degrade after 5 or so years).
A fan who receives gifts or money in exchange for positive public relations work, and doesn't disclose this, is a shill.
So no, it's really easy to tell the difference - unless there is intent to deceive.
I have a hard time calling it "immoral" though, in the sense that we're talking about the Free Market, where such fancy ideas such as morality evidently bear no relevance. Put it in the big pile of "badwrong" by the door.
I dont.
Accepting money for comments and not disclosing it is deceiving an audience. It doesn't matter if it's JoHam on Slashdot taking money from Apple or British Prime Minister David Cameron taking money from the EDL in exchange for favorable comments (not that I'm accusing anyone of astroturfing or shilling, these are examples only). By not disclosing the financial interest behind the comments, its deliberately and knowingly deceiving an audience.
So it's completely immoral and for a broadcaster or notable person it's completely illegal in my country (Australia) and David Cameron's. See the "cash for comments" scandal in Australia for more details.
I don't get it when people dis "copycat apps", claiming they are "ripping off" the original authors. Copied games are probably the purest form of the free-market in action; they provide alternate sources for the same (or similar) product, and they encourage competition.
This is what the "authors" want to prevent.
They don't want others making minor variations of the same game and selling them before they can make minor variations of the same game and sell them.
Vista didn't actually suck all that much if you used it for enough time...
Stockholm syndrome starts this way. With enough exposure to their captors the captive begins to empathise with their captors, as Stockholm syndrome progresses the captive begins to assist their captors and in some cases, even starts to believe in their cause.
Slashdot Mirror
Traffic accidents kill more people than natural disasters by orders of magnitude, and "lifestyle" diseases such as cancer and heart disease dwarf all else.
The problem is, admitting that traffic accidents are a major killer means that we have to admit the majority of people are terrible drivers. Then we'd have to look at why most people are terrible drivers...
Well lets just say this has already been done, and the the results weren't good. It required most people to change their driving habits dramatically and it was a lot easier for them to just accept the deaths and hope they weren't amongst them whilst making up a revenue conspiracy to make ignoring the data more palatable.
Who has a two ton car? In Europe I see lots of larger cars and even smaller ones are over a ton and most are Diesels which pollute pretty badly as well. A MKV VW Golf weighs a ton and a half (2900 lbs). Besides the discussion is around pollution and a small car or scooter or motorcycle is not necessarily less polluting than a big car.
A VW Golf GTI VI at 1360 KG, so a fair bit off a ton and a half (that 1500 KG if you dont understand basic metric measurements).
And a Golf is not a small car by Australian standards, let alone European standards. A Toyota Corolla weighs in at 1290 KG, lets compare this to actual small cars like a Fiat Punto (1024 KG) or a Nissan Micra (942 KG) and then lets pick a smallish American car, the 6cyl Chrysler 300C, weighing in at a paltry 1820 KG.
A BMW 330d weights 1540 KG and a Nissan Skyline 370 GT weights 1600 KG, both 3 to 4 L V6's with more power than the Chrysler (not to mention better transmissions, suspension and use a lot less fuel).
A hundred KG's makes a bit of difference. A lightweight sports car like a Mazda MX-5 (Miata) weighs around 1100 KG. Something like an SUV gets over 2000 KG with almost no trouble, a BMW X5 = 2044KG and the X5 is a lightweight, even a small Holden/Opel/Vauxhall/Chevy Captiva 7 SUV weighs in at 1680 KG in it's lightest form (1850 KG if you want a V6 or turbo diesel) and the lightest Land Rover Discovery 4 is 2495 KG. Consider the popularity of big SUV's in the US, it's not hard to say there are quite a few a 2 ton cars on the road.
Forcing someone to work in the same space as someone else is psychologically stressful no matter how fine you are with it.
You think that's bad? When the company I work for sends 2 same-sex employees off for any sort of training or event, they only spring for 1 hotel room.
I haven't found much in my career that's more unsettling than having to split a bedroom/shitter with someone who is, essentially, a complete stranger.
LLLLLuxury.
That's not cheap. Cheap is when they don't send you for any training that isn't free.
My last employer wouldn't spring for training due to the fact I was a contractor (fair enough) but the job before that was a full time position. Training was all self directed, I had to buy all resources myself (meaning I had to buy a course book and read it, if they didn't get a tax break for time I put down as "training" I would have had to do that in my own time too) and then take the test which I had to pay for and I'd get reimbursed only if I passed and it was useful to the company. That's cheap, your example is merely an annoyance.
Decent headphones make open plan offices bearable.
I wonder if it's an extrovert/introvert thing.
I don't like listening to music whilst working, its a distraction. I also don't like earplugs or other forms of hearing protection that block out noise (my ears end up covered in sweat, which is uncomfortable.
I like working in quiet areas, I can happily tolerate and filter out a certain level of background noise but open plan offices mean I have to listen to the vapid conversations of all the stupid people I inevitably have to sit near. In one of my previous jobs they put me right next to sales. I've lost count of the number of times I had to tell them to shut up because I couldn't hear my client (who expects me to fix their problems). Conversations about boring weekends, kids, cats, whatever crazy religion they've started following, almost nothing work related (not that sales and marketing do actual work). All of it driving me nuts when I've got a complex problem the client wants fixed 20 minutes ago.
So I'd rather be in a nice sensible cube farm. If anyone wants to talk to me they can use IM, email, the phone or just come to my cube. If I need the entire team, we'll go into a meeting room and when I need to get down to work I can be relatively isolated from distractions in my cube.
I also don't buy that whole collaboration thing. Open plan is nothing more than a tax dodge. A full sized partition is considered a wall (part of the building) and is depreciated over 40 years. Smaller partitions are considered furniture and depreciated in a much shorter time (3 years in Oz).
Lots of sites won't make it easy to use passwords that are secure, user friendly, and somewhat unique. I have a financial services account that I can't change that allows 6-8 alphanumeric characters beginning with a letter, no spaces or other special characters. Education has to go both ways.
I agree,
The problem isn't with the sites for the most part, rather it's with the software (I.E. Microsoft's idea of what makes a strong password is firmly locked in the 90's) as most sites and organisations are limited by the settings their software has by default. However what I meant is it's entirely possible to make a complex, somewhat unique and hard to crack password that fits in with the description that you describe and all you have to remember is Bob4. You simply repeat Bob4 three times to produce Bob4Bob4Bob4, meeting your sites requirements and being simple to remember. Obviously you can pick your own 3 or 4 letter word and number.
That's a really cool thought experiment. Frankly I've always thought the rise of self driving cars would just make a world of taxis. You call a car on your "smart device" get in, it takes you wherever, you get off and it goes on to its next customer. Should be ultra, fantastically cheap and efficient, and you just make the interior able to be power hosed down every four hours. Or maybe a nicer automated cleaning for the "better" services.
I highly doubt self driving cars will become like taxi's. Definitely not in the short term because people will still own their own self driving car and organising a municipal fleet is expensive and fraught with bureaucracy (especially if it's done by the private sector, the politics of it will be even worse than city/state politics). Maybe in the long term but it would require a significant shift in the way we think about transportation in our society or for individual cars to become so expensive that owning one is something only the rich can afford.
Automated taxis will operate like traditional taxi's except that the driver will speak English and smell slightly better. So people will still want to own their own cars as they don't want to wait 45 minutes for a peak period taxi. There will still be long waits because you have a majority of the city wanting to move at the same time and a limited number of taxis. On this subject, automated cars are not a magic bullet for traffic congestion because it doesn't actually remove cars from the road.
it's been like that for well over a century.
No it hasn't. In 1960, 5.3% of black babies were born out of wedlock. In 2012 it was 69%. We can "blame society" for many of the problems, due to misguided social policies on the left, and massive expansion of prisons on the right, but there is still plenty of additional blame to heap on the individuals for their own bad choices.
In 1960 if you knocked up a 16 yr old girl, her dad made you marry her at gunpoint.
In 2012, if you knock up a 16 yr old girl, you get counseling whilst she goes on 16 and pregnant.
Marriage is a terrible metric for teen pregnancy considering fewer people in this age are actually getting married and those that do are generally getting married later in life. Now I think that teen pregnancy is actually lower today than in 1960 simply because there is more emphasis on contraception and sexual education.
As for blaming society, people are ultimately the product of the society they live in. Trying to push the blame solely onto individuals is a cop out. If you don't take measures to improve society, you cant expect individuals to better themselves en mass. When a lot of individuals from the same area or socioeconomic background make the same mistakes, you can almost always trace this back to their education (or lack their of), which makes is a social issue.
why they fuck does my email have the ability and the use of a stronger password system than my bank? Not talking about making 255 charter high ascii stuff here just minimum length, with the ability to toss a ? or a { in the mix...
I'd be asking why your bank isn't using 2 factor authentication.
/.ers rubbing their hands with glee telling me how this system is flawed, yep, I'm sure it's got flaws but it's a hell of a lot more secure than just a username and password. A thief now has to get my username and password _AND_ steal my phone or know me well enough to fraudulently transfer my phone no into their name (which is getting harder and harder for letterbox thieves as I have few paper bills now days).
If anyone gets my banking username and password all they can do is look at my modest bank account. If they try to do anything then the bank sends a one time code to my phone via SMS and they cant do anything without that code. They cant even read my transaction history without a one time code.
I'm sure there are some pedantic
This is also why I dont use banking apps. They store details and many banks emphatically trust them. So all a thief has to do is swipe my phone and they get full access... If I used them that is. Web sites work just as well (often have more functionality too) and mr phone thief only gets my aging handset and what little credit is left on there.
One of the reasons (one, it's a complex topic) is that we, the security professionals, are too dense to properly explain things in a language the user understands correctly.
You've got this so backwards its not funny.
It's that the average user is so dense that they cant understand the security professional and they're also so lazy that they wont learn or even take basic self preservation measures unless their forced to. The average end user would still be accepting candy from strangers well into their golden years if it wasn't drilled into them from the age of 2.
If you hadn't been so obnoxious I could have given you credit about understanding that few security professionals understand how to talk to users, but you have gotten it so horribly backwards I cant even credit you with this.
Security professionals do need to learn how to communicate with the average user, but this means they need to dumb down, not dumb up.
Maybe, you know, the problem is in the method. Passwords suck..
Maybe you'd like to suggest a better form of authentication that isn't easily forged (fingerprints), easily stolen (swipe cards), horribly insecure (personal details), horribly intrusive (sub dermal implants) or stupidly time consuming/expensive (DNA tests).
Again, you're dead wrong. Passwords are fine for their intended purpose, people are not. Passwords, even simple passwords like 123456 are most vulnerable to social attacks. Your biggest problem are people and the fact they don't take security seriously.
That's a social problem - one best solved via social means. Like disciplinary action via management.
Or education, it is possible to produce passwords that are both secure, user friendly and somewhat unique.
For most organisations I think phishing is the biggest problem, even if they haven't got it stuck on a sticky note on their monitor (I've been telling people to put it on the inside of the back cover of a book instead) a lot of people are still dumb enough to give it to Fred from Microsoft (who happens to have a thick accent) who calls them out of the blue.
You say that like it's not also true without socialized or universal heathcare. The only difference is that the costs are hidden in taxes, unpaid debt, and lost productivity instead of merely taxes. Or did you think all those unpaid medical bills just disappeared?
Actually with universal health care, it's less hidden than without as the government has to publish budgets and activity statements explaining where the money went. No-one in the private sector has the same level of accountability.
This is how we know exactly how much public health care in Australia cost and how, per person it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the cheapest private health cover in the US.
No shit sherlock.
Fever is one of your body's ways to fight infection. When you supress it, you "enable the virus."
But I will take antipyretics when I damn well feel like it. Tough shit if someone else gets sick.
DARWIN, BABY!
Whether you're taking medication or not, when you've got the flu it's only getting plenty of fluids and rest that will hasten your recovery.
But as a god damned common courtesy, when I'm sick I'll stay home away from others so I dont pass it on, regardless of whether I've taken any cold and flu meds.
Funny, in North America, people get so few vacation/sick days that they feel they have to use up all of both. People will often call in sick when they really just want a vacation day. People think it's their duty to use up all their sick days, whether they are actually sick or not. And then they wonder why the quota for sick days is so low....
In Australia employers (20 days paid annual leave + 10 paid sick days) an employer is legally entitled to ask for a medical certificate from a doctor when an employee takes sick leave but a lot of employers have just renamed sick leave as "personal leave" and generally don't require a medical certificate unless you've taken a chunk of it at once. They did this because a lot of people have to take the day off for personal appointments (lawyers, banks et al. who don't work weekends) or to look after kids/significant other/dependents (carers leave).
It depends on your employer, but being an arse about it is generally frowned upon and even though you wont get in trouble with the law, you'll find you can only get idiots and layabouts working for you as the good staff are working for companies that aren't bastards.
I realize this seems like sound advice, but it genuinely isn't, unless you're prepared for it in advance.
You may have heard of delivery.
Even in Western Australia (still stuck in the early 90's), supermarkets deliver as do Pizza and fish and chip shops.
Beyond this, going down to the shop is not going to kill anyone, least of all you (if it is that bad, you need to get to a hospital).
So unless you're a 75+ yr old with mobility issues, no friends or family and enough irrational paranoia to not own a phone you'll be fine with the flu (however if you're 75+, you probably should still see a doctor).
Who in hell thought it was a good idea to use a system where a single piece of information, consisting of just a few bytes, gives someone a blank check to my bank account? There are innumerable ways to concoct something more secure than this, especially these days when computing power (to do encryption) is ubiquitous. Such methods are of course not bulletproof, but they're a hell of a lot better than a guy with a pair of binoculars stealing credit card numbers, or what happened at Target.
That was the old security system, they've made it even worse since adding NFC. They dont even need access to your card to get enough information to use it without your knowledge or permission. There's even an app for it for any Android phone with NFC
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samj.CardTest&hl=en
NFC on phones have no range due to low power but NFC has max range of 5 metres, so it's just a matter building the right antenna. Even though you wont get the max range of 5 metres, even a radius of 1 metre is enough in a crowded shop.
Also anyone who believes the bank will simply adsorb the cost of the fraud instead of passing it onto you and merchants who'll just pass it back to you (banks are likely to use the merchants, they don't have a choice but to suck up additional fees and look like the bad guy raising prices), well, I have a bridge to sell you.
His point is that "Ukraine" is acceptable. "The Ukraine" is not.
Of course, I learned my eastern European geography from my Risk board game almost 50 years ago, so it will forever be the Ukraine to me.
Well I'm going the other way and proposing that we add "the" in front of every single country. The England, The Germany, The Belize and so forth.
The fact that we have had so many totalitarian "communist" countries is simply because
Labeling something you dont like as communist has been incredibly popular over the last 60 odd years.
Very few of the so called communist countries are actually communist. Even China is only really communist by name. "Communism" has become little more than a dark specter used in propaganda and most people these days couldn't identify real communism of their lives depended on it.
I guess I am spoiled. I grew up in Conservative Texas, where the communist TXU provided power, cheaper and more reliably than anywhere else in the US. Though power in TX went to shit when they privatized.
Same story with Australian states that went the same way. I'm in one of the lucky states where the power distribution utility was corpratised, so no longer under direct govt control but still has no profit motive. States that went for full privatisation ended up with horrible power bills.
Private companies that had capped profits is what brought us AT&T and the insurance industry.
Corpratised entities aren't technically private. They're more like non-profit organisations that have to provide a service. At the very worst, they have to turn over their profit to the government.
The real solution for the "natural monopoly" is to have the infrastructure owned by the government, and providers buy service from there. It works great for mobile service in Europe (or did, until privatization took hold, and the assets were sold off below market, and the profits were lost and service got worse.
It doesn't even have to be the government, rather it's an entity that has no commercial interests in the infrastructure they're providing. This can be done by making the wholesale provider a completely separate corporate entity from retail providers (and preventing the wholesale provider from being a retail provider).
A government service like a infrastructure provider can be corporatised and run on it's own $0 profit mandate without govt interference. They only have to make enough to meet costs (incl. expansion costs).
Free market, bitches! Suck it you socialist faggots!
Free market means exactly that - if the vendors do something despicable the customers stop doing business with them and choose other vendors who won't do similarly despicable things to them.
And that's exactly why the free market doesn't work.
It relies upon:
1. Customers being smart and savvy enough to realise a vendor is being despicable and rational enough to walk away.
2. That at least one vendor isn't doing despicable things.
1 fails because people are irrational and emotional creatures. Not only do a lot of people not realise they're getting ripped off or taken for a ride, a lot will actually defend it because they get emotionally invested in something (there are a lot of fanboys).
2 has entire industries of examples as to why it fails. Collusion becomes a lot easier when there are no pesky laws preventing it, collusion becomes easy on a massive scale.
The auto makers may not realize it, but they DO get money from used car sales. People sell their old car to get money to put toward a new one.
I agree with you, I couldn't agree more but the car manufacturers don't agree.
They're a lot like the music industry, every time you buy a used BMW, you're depriving BMW of revenue. The only difference is that laws in many nations (including Germany) prevent them from putting in a "DRM" like control into the engine or other vital hardware, however nothing stops them from doing it with optional equipment (I.E. the stereo uses a non standard slot and socket, charges for GPS updates, sound deadening is designed to degrade after 5 or so years).
A fan who receives gifts or money in exchange for positive public relations work, and doesn't disclose this, is a shill.
So no, it's really easy to tell the difference - unless there is intent to deceive.
I have a hard time calling it "immoral" though, in the sense that we're talking about the Free Market, where such fancy ideas such as morality evidently bear no relevance. Put it in the big pile of "badwrong" by the door.
I dont.
Accepting money for comments and not disclosing it is deceiving an audience. It doesn't matter if it's JoHam on Slashdot taking money from Apple or British Prime Minister David Cameron taking money from the EDL in exchange for favorable comments (not that I'm accusing anyone of astroturfing or shilling, these are examples only). By not disclosing the financial interest behind the comments, its deliberately and knowingly deceiving an audience.
So it's completely immoral and for a broadcaster or notable person it's completely illegal in my country (Australia) and David Cameron's. See the "cash for comments" scandal in Australia for more details.
I don't get it when people dis "copycat apps", claiming they are "ripping off" the original authors. Copied games are probably the purest form of the free-market in action; they provide alternate sources for the same (or similar) product, and they encourage competition.
This is what the "authors" want to prevent.
They don't want others making minor variations of the same game and selling them before they can make minor variations of the same game and sell them.
Windows NT - doesn't fit the pattern so people ignore it
Windows 2000 - doesn't fit the pattern so people ignore it
The pattern doesn't work at all.
People forget that Windows 3.x, 9x and ME were the DOS line of OS's and NT, 2000, XP and on are NT based OS's.
Vista didn't actually suck all that much if you used it for enough time...
Stockholm syndrome starts this way. With enough exposure to their captors the captive begins to empathise with their captors, as Stockholm syndrome progresses the captive begins to assist their captors and in some cases, even starts to believe in their cause.