And I am neither saying any of this is good or bad.
The simple fact is this giuy is a citizen. He already moved here, he already became a citizen. He is just as much a citizen as anyone who has been here... this is his HOME now.
He wants to run for office, more power to him. I have lived here all my life and never got off my ass and tried to get elected to office. I imagine the same is true of you too. The litmus test is the will of the people...
if the people vote for him and put him in office, its because they think he is competent to do the job. Whether he was born there or not is not relevant if the people elect him. End of story.
How he got here or where he is from have little bearing now. Thats the past. If its what people want to vote on, thats their perogative, but to cast a wary eye on him or suggest that something i swrong with him because he is an immigrant is, I think, unconsionable.
You could "forget about it" until you can invite someone under 18 over and have them use the bathroom.
Then "find" the camera... call the police, be sure ot tell them that a minor uysed the bathroom and was probably recorded... get him arrested for child porn.
Overall I like the idea of hitting his pocket... search and destroy! Leave no evidence.
Better yet get compensation... have a friend sell them and keep the money
Naturalised citizens are here because they chose to be, people born here are here because of accident of birth and either never had the ambition, means, or desire to go anywhere else.
WHat does this have to do with being "geek friendly"? Nothing at all.
Is there something wrong with people who have come to our country from somewhere else and found enough love for the place to go through the process and take the oath to become a citizen?
If the country and even the district is now their home, why should they not involve themselves in the government there. It is their home. Or do we lose all right to participate (which is more than the vast majority of peopl ein the district do I imagine, born there or not) in the community and the government?
Should they just be dowtrodden outsiders, taking it as its given to them and liking it?
Well then I am certainly glad we have laws to put violent people who can't control themselves behind bars when they take the law into their own hands.
Your desire to see someone suffer for ANY reason does not give you any right to hand out justice at the sweet spot of a baseball bat.
I don't know what a GBH is (greaseball head lock?), but I don't need to. Whatever it is, it is the job of the state to hand out punishment, not you. I really hope you don't have to find out just how little sympathy vigilantis get.
TRhe simple fact is we are tlaking about the pretty harmless posting of some damned innocuous photos.
Big deal. Get over it. Its not like theres been anything identifying in there. He couldn't return it to the owner if he wanted to.
Hell for all you know, he took the photos himself and is making a plea for attention. Whatever, get over it.
Um yes you are right, the properties of a technology should be considered before it is deployed to solve a problem.
However, for the set of problems where the requirements include the ability to send a message and be sure, absolutly, that it has not been intercepted by a man in the middle, and may need to detect that someone is listening, then you have a good match.
If you need to get a message through whether someone is listening or not, and have no need to know absolutly if someone is eavesdropping, then maybe this is not a good solution to your problem.
So yah, this isn't a panecea. But its damned cool.
Its like the point about military encryption. Sometimes you need to transmit data one way and need to be sure that the end points are obscured and that the message is not captured by the enemy.... so you get a short wave radio and transmit using a one time pad. (see Numbers Stations) Think of these as leaked secrets, you don't want the british spooks to find out the queens maid is relaying to you the details of overheard meetings do you?
Or maybe its troop movements. You don't really care if your enemy can decode messages that will tell him where you were planning to strike him if it takes him so long to decode it that the resulting message tells him where you struck him two days ago.
Ok first of all the number of crimes that has been commited with these weapons is statistically insignifigant anyway.
Yes really. Aside from a few random gangland drive bys and a couple of high profile cases, nobody uses them for anything other than target practice.
Why? Its a purely logistical matter. Your average 9mm pistol is a) a whole heck of alot cheaper b) a whole heck of alot easier to conceal and c) just as effective for 99.999% of the crimes that people commit with guns.
Nobody walks into a convinience store with an ak-47 looking for the cash. MAYBE they walk into a bank with one, but lets face it, your average bank robber doesn't even use a weapon. All he has to do is walk up to the clerk and hand them a note claiming to have one... no clerk or security every questions the fact that he has one for the safety of themselves and all of their customers.
This has absolutly no bearing on crime rate at all.
of course I first saw this fork bomb in a slightly different form... change the : to . and thats it.
good to add that function to someones bashrc if they leave their terminal open. They are much more likely to unsuspectingly use . than : at the command line (why would you NOP in an interactive shell?)
Anyway I first saw it in someones.sig and did a cut and paste into a bash shell because I just couldn't figure out what it did (my shell-fu is much better these days)
My poor 486dx was never quite the same again... I could have sworn i heard a tiny scream every time I tried to source a file. Must have been shell shock.
> In America, we have a thriving "culture of victimhood". We blame others for > anything bad that happens to use. We point to our genetics to explain away weak > spots in our character. And we are offended whenever anyone suggests that we > have chosen to live the way we do. We are not simply the sum of our genetics. > Haven't you seen Gattaca?
Ive seen Gattaca, have you seen Big Trouble in Little China? Rockin movie, one of my all time favorites. Proves that we are not the sum of our genetics, we can be enhanced by ancient chineese potions and occasionaly need to fight ancient demons.
Seriously though... I don't really believe this whole "culture of victemhood". It seems to be just the latest version of old arguments about whether people are in the situations they are in solely because of how smart they are and how hard they work, or if they are simply products of extrernal situations (like the genes their parents gave them.
I want to blame the media for example. You hear all these sound bites about this is healthy, that is not healthy, etc. However thats all you hear. As often as not, its poorly researched and misunderstood. Take for example one of my pet peves....
Marijuana use was linked to heart attacks. As I read the article I notice that first of all the study that they got this from had not been studying this at all, but had instead been studying something else entirely. Secondly they were citing stats like "X percent of the marijuana smokers in the study had a heart attack within 24 hours of last smoking". What do we notice here? Well if they are daily smokers, and they randomly have a heat attack, there is a 100% chance that it will be within 24 hours of smoking.
Every other day? 50% chance. Overall the group that smoked pot had a 2 % increase over the non-pot-smokers... and to top it all off, the number of pot smokers was very small. To the point that one or two individuals would be statistically signifigant.
Basically when you sat down and worked out the numbers, they hadn't proved anything, they showed a small potnetial anomaly, one which might warrent its own study even, but they hadn't shown a real link, not like the newspapers were putting in their headlines.
Note, the papers hardly talked at all about the main focus of the study, they didn't care. Pot is news. Lame ass boring studies are not.
This is what really irks me, the media does such a piss poor job of coverage. Nothing is in depth. Its all sound bytes. A journalist I know said it best "When I get a report, I read the first 17 pages, because I know that nobody else is going to read past page 3. Whenever you read an article that quotes a report, you will never see a quote thats from past page 3. So I figure if I get to page 17, I am doing pretty good"
Of course, I can't blame the media, because they are just spewing out what sells, and sound bytes sell... its what people want, they want everything well digested and given to them in small bite sized peices.
And I agree with you there. We shouldn't have to argue with people about our right to move about our own country, which means we shouldn't have our government putting out these lists like this.
They should either have enough evidenc eon an individual where they tell the airlines "if this guy tries to fly, let us know so we can come arrest him", or they should be not releasing their name to anyone.
Basically, unless you rputting their name on a wanted poster, you shouldn'[t be releasing their names anywhere.
But beyond that, I have a problem with systems that don't work as intended. They can't hope to actually acomplish the task that they intend to using systems like this. This has no hope whatsoever of increasing airport security. Hence, it is unfit for its intended task, and should be dismantled on that point alone.
Well if you assume that this is actually expected to increase some amount of security then yes I would assume they did testing.
However I would assume that they know how easy it is to fake ones identity and that this is just meant to be used to annoy undesirables of the curent administration and appear as if they are increasing security when in reality it can't easily be increased any higher than it already is.
Afterall, there really has been no need whatsoever to increase airport security. Its just like John Gilmore's note that the entire process of asking for ID at airports came about after an airplane crashed from a mechanical failure that was, for a short time, thought to be terrorism.
So how does the program of asking for ID prevent mechanical failures? Oh thats right it doesn't. It was yet another attempt to make people FEEL safer in their flights, whether or not the danger was real.
So was Teddy allowed to fly? Yes he was. The prgram works just fine FOR ANYONE WHO CAN MAKE PERSONAL PHONE CALLS TO TOM RIDGE FOR 3 WEEKS!
Makes me feel better. Afterall, I know every slashdotter, much like Teddy, keeps Tom Ridge's personal phone number in his cell phone, and talks to him all the time. Right?
This is slowly changing. Hell my fammily out in east bumfuck NY has DSL now, have had it for a while, hell they even have cell towers out there.
The internet is slowly growing larger. I wouldn't say walmart has put all the smaller stores out of buisness either. Alot of them yah, but they are still out there.
Its definitly "Walmart country" out there though, its the major store.
of cours ethen all you need is enough material to produce a dyson sphere.
Given the relative size of stars to planets... the Boston MOS has a great display where they show the sun and the planets to scale.
They have a portion of a sphere which, if memory serves is stickin gout of the wall. It is about 1/3rd of a sphere...and looks like it has a solid 2/3 of a meter radius. Thats the sun.
The earth is around the size of a golf ball at this scale.
So I am thinking you need to not just mine but just destroy and completely use all of the mass in several thousand planets just to have enough raw material to produce the sphere.
Other than those purely logistical issues, sure, sounds like a great idea.
I have been with you for a LONG time. I never LIKED the Olympics. I always was disdainful and contemptful of it. The ONLY sport that I had any interest in watching was wrestling, because I wrestled.
This however is obnoxious in a way that I dislike very much. I find it so obnoxious that I feel the need to quit quiet contempt, and move to vocal contempt.
I look at it this way... if the people who run the olympics are so deeply in corperate broadcasters pcokets that they are willing to put up restrictions like this... do I even want to give them the benefit of watching?
I think not. I thought it was bad enough when I realised how political the whole Olympic Games were. Now that it seems to be going more and more corperate, its finnaly the last straw.
I will not be watching a single Olympic event, on the internet, on TV, hearing it on the radio etc. They are, as far as I am concerned, a complete non-event so much so that they may as well not even happen. The entire circus is dead to me.
I shall, from this day forward acknoledge the olympics in only 2 ways.
1. As a part of History. Obviously they happened. They caused traffic jams in whatever city they were in, etc.
2. I shall henceforth encourage all others who mention the Olympics to join me in not watching it.
Wont you join me too? Does it really matter? Sure its cool to watch people run around and compete at physical things, but is it really worth supporting these large corperations that are happy to engage in agreements that take away your choice as a consumer just to squeeze a few more dollars into their already overflowing coffers?
This is simple greed, and I have a personal problem with it. Hence, I will do something that even the libertarians out there can't disagree with. I am voting with my eyes and my dollars. I am not watching the olympics and avoiding anything that supports is.
Its not that this is the be all nd end all, it was entirely too nationalistic and corperate long before this, this is just the straw that broke this camels back.
And what gets me, is I go to the Stop&Shop in Malden a 1 or 2 in the morning sometimes. I grab a few things and head to the checkout. They have 1 cashier running a normal register!
Why do they close all the self check out lanes at night?
Seems to me like it woul dbe most efficient to just have 1 clerk man the kiosk and watch the 4 self checkouts than to sit there in a single standard lane.
CEO of a software company eh? Well he must be on the up and up then! No way he could possibly be badmouthing linux because he has a vested interest in seeing more windows boxen eh?
Theres really nothing new here. First he talks about the "number of Linux vulnerabilities", of course no distinguishing between core "linux" and the plehtora of other applications out there. Maybe we need to look at the ratio of security issue exposed software, daemon applications and the like, to the number of vulnerabilities? lets face it, for every network service, everybody and his brother has written a server for linux that speaks it. Guess what, yah thats alot, probably even alot more than windows by far.
Then he goes on to what sound to me like obviously embedded systems. Aircraft controls etc. So we are going to count security bugs in ftp servers against a system thats never going to be connected to a network, much less run an ftp server in the first place?
I agree with him of course, Linux should not be used in applications that require certain certifications until it has those certifications. Wow, big revelation there. Earth shattering even.
All in all this is a stupid article written by someone who is either a) stupid enough to not realise that his arguments are pointless or b) someone trying to attack linux for his own financial interest or maybe c) both of the above.
Right, I did a report on something related to this years ago early in high school. See my mother was an X-Ray tech and she pointed me at some fun stuff. Thorium.
See X-Ray machines don't do so well at taking pictures of tissue. So to get a picture of your digestive tract or other organs, you need to add whats known as a "contrast solution". Well back in the 50s they had a good one that contained throium.
It was great, pictures rivaled what they can do today, and since alpha particles are stopped by paper, they should be harmless, and that 1400 year half life wont matter, right?
Didn't exactly work out that way. The radiation just slowly destroyed these peoples organs. Their liver, kidneys, etc. Nasty stuff.
I just want to say that Jack Chick has brought so much pleasure into my life. I hope he does come out with a comic on this, I will buy it. I can't wait to find out how this is a trick by satan trying to pull the wool over our eyes and make us believe in evolution.
Of course he is doing this indirectly, but its obvious as soon as you trace the cause back to conspiracies within the Catholic church, which, correct me if I am wrong, unwittingly practices a form of Baal worship.
Don't underestimate a true scammer. Chances are this is a number he picked out of the phone book... or the number of some other person that made a stick when he scammed them.
These people can be insanely clever. I know, I lived with one for a while and never even realised it until one day when I ran into his previous roomate.
Long story short, its the same scam always. They apear to be something, a vendor, a guy with a job, etc. Next thing you know, you are out money because you trusted them as much as you would have trusted anyone who was what they apeared to be. Then, they are gone.
If you have some way to contact them fine, they will talk to you, afterall, maybe they can find some new angle to use on you. I talked with a psychologist about them once, often they even come to believe their own lies. Afterall, if you can convince yourself, then its easier to convince others.
They can be slippery as hell too. SPread the scam around as much as possible. If you take one person too much you can get in trouble, bu tits alot harder to catch lots of little frauds all over the place, alot of people just don't want to deal with it... afterall... they can file police reports, and whatnot, in the end their money is gone anyway. The chances of recovering even a dime is slim to none.
My scammer had been writtin gbad checks to his previous landlord and then stealing their mail and taking the bounce notices from th ebank out. Got away with it for months until he disspeared to come live with me and they found all that mail in his room.
I couldn't convince them to even report it. They talked to a lawyer and he basically said "You wont get a dime out of him" so they dropped it.
I went to the police with a bounced 1800 check that he wrote me... and they took a report and um... oh yah, did nothing. One bounced check in a city this size, They didn't have time for that. by the time they could have gotten around to looking for him he was long gone, skipped town.
There is a mental condition known as anti-social behavior. Many of these people fit the mold on that one. I remember conversations late into the night over a bottle of wine with this guy, he wa sgenuinly likable on a social level, but something was always off. He had no sympathy for people out in the world.
When I told him that I heard people were selling rocks saying they were peices of the WTC, the 9/11 rubble he said wow, "I feel bad that I didn't think of that". Its not just a joke, he had that sincere tone about it.
Even after it was over he would see me on AIM for a little while. HE would send me IMs like nothing had changed. "Hey dude whats up?"...
Its true. The only card key I have to go through is to get into the server room, which is, understandably, higher security.
The only other place I see them are the front doors to dorms, you need a card to enter the building, then once you are in, its keys.
It makes sense for dorm buildings. What do you do when you kick a student out or one leaves, or loses his keys? Sure maybe you rekey his room, but do you now have to rekey the building too? Issue new keys to everyone?
Now if he loses his ID, you take his old ID off the authorized list, issue him a new ID, and your done.
Are there more reasons? beats me, I don't work for campus police.
Your right I did... but more so I forgot to read what I wrote... I meant draws not mates. And I would check the quote by my chess quotes book is in a box somewhere right now.
but I didn't put it in quotes.... I was paraphrasing.
Its the US that he has been hiding from for the past 29 years or so.
Granted, he has only been "wanted" in the US for 12 years, he has been supposedly in hiding since 1975.
Japan is going to hand him over to the US, said it right in the article. He wouldn't have been committing passport violations if he hadn't been wanted in the US.
Why? because we need it. (ok I work for a different univ. and not much for CCTV but we have swipe cards here and there).
The thing is Universities are great targets for small time criminals. Lots of people going in and out, many faces, unattended equipment. At least with swipe card access, you can be somewhat sure that people in the area are suposed to be there. It helps.
It doesn't stop door jacking of course, which was one of my favorite techniques at a previous job (wouldn't give me card access to some areas before 9 am, even though I started at 8 and often had jobs to do in there, so I would just door jack my way in, and get my work done)
Youd be amazed at the things that can go on on a campus. Some amount of security is important, theres basically 3 types of areas they need to secure. 1) places where people live (dorms... Frats are generally completly open and the U doesn't give a fuck), 2) places with lots of expensive computer equipment 3) Dangerous labs.
Just ask some student friends of mine who rented a house off campus last year. They threw some great parties, and had 11 people living in the house. There was so much in and out foot traffic that they had problems with people walking in off the street and stealing things.
Its easy for places with alot of people traffic to get a high profile and become a target.
-Steve
Re:Open mouth, insert paranoid foot
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well Fischer has always been politically incorrect. This is the same man that accused the russians of ruinin ghte game of chess by always playing for mates against eachother and always playing western masters for the win, and saying that women can't play chess because theres not a woman in the world he couldn't beat given knights odds. (not that there are more than a handful of men that could beat him with knights odds)
As a friend informs me, he had dissapeared back in the 70s because he believed the US government was out to get him. So in his mind he had been in hiding from the US for 26 years before he said that.
I guess the upshot is that we can now all expect a few more good crzy bobby fischer quotes in the near future.
Frankly i think its all pretty bogus. Ok Yugoslavia was under sanctions. Big deal. He went there to play chess. I think this entire mess shows an inflated sense of self importance for the US gov, or at least hypocracy. The UN matters when they agree with US and doesn't matter when they don't?
Hes an old coot who was one of the most well known chess grand masters ever. SO much so that he gave up his title and quit the game years before I was born, and I still know who he was. Just let him be, hes not hurting anyone.
Sure hes an asshole, but should bein gan asshole really be a crime?
Slashdot Mirror
And I am neither saying any of this is good or bad.
The simple fact is this giuy is a citizen. He already moved here, he already became a citizen. He is just as much a citizen as anyone who has been here... this is his HOME now.
He wants to run for office, more power to him. I have lived here all my life and never got off my ass and tried to get elected to office. I imagine the same is true of you too. The litmus test is the will of the people...
if the people vote for him and put him in office, its because they think he is competent to do the job. Whether he was born there or not is not relevant if the people elect him. End of story.
How he got here or where he is from have little bearing now. Thats the past. If its what people want to vote on, thats their perogative, but to cast a wary eye on him or suggest that something i swrong with him because he is an immigrant is, I think, unconsionable.
-Steve
heh heh
You could "forget about it" until you can invite someone under 18 over and have them use the bathroom.
Then "find" the camera... call the police, be sure ot tell them that a minor uysed the bathroom and was probably recorded... get him arrested for child porn.
Overall I like the idea of hitting his pocket... search and destroy! Leave no
evidence.
Better yet get compensation... have a friend sell them and keep the money
-Steve
Better yet...
break the camera into bits.
Take a shit
drop bit sof camera on top of the shit.
don't flush.
Ask him to remove his device from the bathroom.
-Steve
Naturalised citizens are here because they chose to be, people born here are here because of accident of birth and either never had the ambition, means, or desire to go anywhere else.
WHat does this have to do with being "geek friendly"? Nothing at all.
Is there something wrong with people who have come to our country from somewhere else and found enough love for the place to go through the process and take the oath to become a citizen?
If the country and even the district is now their home, why should they not involve themselves in the government there. It is their home. Or do we lose all right to participate (which is more than the vast majority of peopl ein the district do I imagine, born there or not) in the community and the government?
Should they just be dowtrodden outsiders, taking it as its given to them and liking it?
-Steve
Well then I am certainly glad we have laws to put violent people who can't control themselves behind bars when they take the law into their own hands.
Your desire to see someone suffer for ANY reason does not give you any right to hand out justice at the sweet spot of a baseball bat.
I don't know what a GBH is (greaseball head lock?), but I don't need to. Whatever it is, it is the job of the state to hand out punishment, not you. I really hope you don't have to find out just how little sympathy vigilantis get.
TRhe simple fact is we are tlaking about the pretty harmless posting of some damned innocuous photos.
Big deal. Get over it. Its not like theres been anything identifying in there. He couldn't return it to the owner if he wanted to.
Hell for all you know, he took the photos himself and is making a plea for attention. Whatever, get over it.
-Steve
Um yes you are right, the properties of a technology should be considered before it is deployed to solve a problem.
However, for the set of problems where the requirements include the ability to send a message and be sure, absolutly, that it has not been intercepted by a man in the middle, and may need to detect that someone is listening, then you
have a good match.
If you need to get a message through whether someone is listening or not, and have no need to know absolutly if someone is eavesdropping, then maybe this is not a good solution to your problem.
So yah, this isn't a panecea. But its damned cool.
Its like the point about military encryption. Sometimes you need to transmit data one way and need to be sure that the end points are obscured and that the message is not captured by the enemy.... so you get a short wave radio and transmit using a one time pad. (see Numbers Stations) Think of these as leaked secrets, you don't want the british spooks to find out the queens maid is relaying to you the details of overheard meetings do you?
Or maybe its troop movements. You don't really care if your enemy can decode messages that will tell him where you were planning to strike him if it takes him so long to decode it that the resulting message tells him where you struck him two days ago.
Its all a matter of application.
-Steve
Ahahahahahaha
Ok first of all the number of crimes that has been commited with these weapons is statistically insignifigant anyway.
Yes really. Aside from a few random gangland drive bys and a couple of high profile cases, nobody uses them for anything other than target practice.
Why? Its a purely logistical matter. Your average 9mm pistol is a) a whole heck of alot cheaper b) a whole heck of alot easier to conceal and c) just as effective for 99.999% of the crimes that people commit with guns.
Nobody walks into a convinience store with an ak-47 looking for the cash. MAYBE they walk into a bank with one, but lets face it, your average bank robber doesn't even use a weapon. All he has to do is walk up to the clerk and hand them a note claiming to have one... no clerk or security every questions the fact that he has one for the safety of themselves and all of their customers.
This has absolutly no bearing on crime rate at all.
-Steve
of course I first saw this fork bomb in a slightly different form...
.sig and did a cut and paste into a bash shell because I just couldn't figure out what it did (my shell-fu is much better these days)
change the : to . and thats it.
good to add that function to someones bashrc if they leave their terminal open. They are much more likely to unsuspectingly use . than : at the command
line (why would you NOP in an interactive shell?)
Anyway I first saw it in someones
My poor 486dx was never quite the same again... I could have sworn i heard a tiny scream every time I tried to source a file. Must have been shell shock.
-Steve
> In America, we have a thriving "culture of victimhood". We blame others for
> anything bad that happens to use. We point to our genetics to explain away weak
> spots in our character. And we are offended whenever anyone suggests that we
> have chosen to live the way we do. We are not simply the sum of our genetics.
> Haven't you seen Gattaca?
Ive seen Gattaca, have you seen Big Trouble in Little China? Rockin movie, one of my all time favorites. Proves that we are not the sum of our genetics, we can be enhanced by ancient chineese potions and occasionaly need to fight ancient demons.
Seriously though... I don't really believe this whole "culture of victemhood". It seems to be just the latest version of old arguments about whether people are in the situations they are in solely because of how smart they are and how hard they work, or if they are simply products of extrernal situations (like the genes their parents gave them.
I want to blame the media for example. You hear all these sound bites about this is healthy, that is not healthy, etc. However thats all you hear. As often as not, its poorly researched and misunderstood. Take for example one of my pet peves....
Marijuana use was linked to heart attacks. As I read the article I notice that first of all the study that they got this from had not been studying this at all, but had instead been studying something else entirely. Secondly they were citing stats like "X percent of the marijuana smokers in the study had a heart attack within 24 hours of last smoking". What do we notice here? Well if they are daily smokers, and they randomly have a heat attack, there is a 100% chance that it will be within 24 hours of smoking.
Every other day? 50% chance. Overall the group that smoked pot had a 2 % increase over the non-pot-smokers... and to top it all off, the number of pot smokers was very small. To the point that one or two individuals would be statistically signifigant.
Basically when you sat down and worked out the numbers, they hadn't proved anything, they showed a small potnetial anomaly, one which might warrent its own study even, but they hadn't shown a real link, not like the newspapers were putting in their headlines.
Note, the papers hardly talked at all about the main focus of the study, they didn't care. Pot is news. Lame ass boring studies are not.
This is what really irks me, the media does such a piss poor job of coverage. Nothing is in depth. Its all sound bytes. A journalist I know said it best "When I get a report, I read the first 17 pages, because I know that nobody else is going to read past page 3. Whenever you read an article that quotes a report, you will never see a quote thats from past page 3. So I figure if I get to page 17, I am doing pretty good"
Of course, I can't blame the media, because they are just spewing out what sells, and sound bytes sell... its what people want, they want everything well digested and given to them in small bite sized peices.
And I agree with you there. We shouldn't have to argue with people about our right to move about our own country, which means we shouldn't have our government putting out these lists like this.
They should either have enough evidenc eon an individual where they tell the airlines "if this guy tries to fly, let us know so we can come arrest him", or they should be not releasing their name to anyone.
Basically, unless you rputting their name on a wanted poster, you shouldn'[t be releasing their names anywhere.
But beyond that, I have a problem with systems that don't work as intended. They can't hope to actually acomplish the task that they intend to using systems like this. This has no hope whatsoever of increasing airport security. Hence, it is unfit for its intended task, and should be dismantled on that point alone.
-Steve
Well if you assume that this is actually expected to increase some amount of security then yes I would assume they did testing.
However I would assume that they know how easy it is to fake ones identity and that this is just meant to be used to annoy undesirables of the curent administration and appear as if they are increasing security when in reality it can't easily be increased any higher than it already is.
Afterall, there really has been no need whatsoever to increase airport security. Its just like John Gilmore's note that the entire process of asking for ID at airports came about after an airplane crashed from a mechanical failure that was, for a short time, thought to be terrorism.
So how does the program of asking for ID prevent mechanical failures? Oh thats right it doesn't. It was yet another attempt to make people FEEL safer in their flights, whether or not the danger was real.
So was Teddy allowed to fly? Yes he was. The prgram works just fine FOR ANYONE WHO CAN MAKE PERSONAL PHONE CALLS TO TOM RIDGE FOR 3 WEEKS!
Makes me feel better. Afterall, I know every slashdotter, much like Teddy, keeps Tom Ridge's personal phone number in his cell phone, and talks to him all the time. Right?
-Steve
This is slowly changing. Hell my fammily out in east bumfuck NY has DSL now, have had it for a while, hell they even have cell towers out there.
The internet is slowly growing larger. I wouldn't say walmart has put all the
smaller stores out of buisness either. Alot of them yah, but they are
still out there.
Its definitly "Walmart country" out there though, its the major store.
Its not the only game in town though.
-Steve
of cours ethen all you need is enough material to produce a dyson sphere.
Given the relative size of stars to planets... the Boston MOS has a great display where they show the sun and the planets to scale.
They have a portion of a sphere which, if memory serves is stickin gout of the wall. It is about 1/3rd of a sphere...and looks like it has a solid 2/3 of a meter radius. Thats the sun.
The earth is around the size of a golf ball at this scale.
So I am thinking you need to not just mine but just destroy and completely use all of the mass in several thousand planets just to have enough raw material to produce the sphere.
Other than those purely logistical issues, sure, sounds like a great idea.
-Steve
Ah but I have left you.
I have been with you for a LONG time. I never LIKED the Olympics. I always was disdainful and contemptful of it. The ONLY sport that I had any interest in watching was wrestling, because I wrestled.
This however is obnoxious in a way that I dislike very much. I find it so obnoxious that I feel the need to quit quiet contempt, and move to vocal contempt.
-Steve
Thats fine I suppose....
But is it really that important?
I look at it this way... if the people who run the olympics are so deeply in corperate broadcasters pcokets that they are willing to put up restrictions like this... do I even want to give them the benefit of watching?
I think not. I thought it was bad enough when I realised how political the whole Olympic Games were. Now that it seems to be going more and more corperate, its finnaly the last straw.
I will not be watching a single Olympic event, on the internet, on TV, hearing it on the radio etc. They are, as far as I am concerned, a complete non-event so much so that they may as well not even happen. The entire circus is dead to me.
I shall, from this day forward acknoledge the olympics in only 2 ways.
1. As a part of History. Obviously they happened. They caused traffic jams in whatever city they were in, etc.
2. I shall henceforth encourage all others who mention the Olympics to join me in not watching it.
Wont you join me too? Does it really matter? Sure its cool to watch people run around and compete at physical things, but is it really worth supporting these large corperations that are happy to engage in agreements that take away your choice as a consumer just to squeeze a few more dollars into their already overflowing coffers?
This is simple greed, and I have a personal problem with it. Hence, I will do something that even the libertarians out there can't disagree with. I am voting with my eyes and my dollars. I am not watching the olympics and avoiding anything that supports is.
Its not that this is the be all nd end all, it was entirely too nationalistic and corperate long before this, this is just the straw that broke this camels back.
Wont you join me?
-Steve
And what gets me, is I go to the Stop&Shop in Malden a 1 or 2 in the morning sometimes. I grab a few things and head to the checkout. They have 1 cashier running a normal register!
Why do they close all the self check out lanes at night?
Seems to me like it woul dbe most efficient to just have 1 clerk man the kiosk and watch the 4 self checkouts than to sit there in a single standard lane.
-Steve
Standard FUD.
CEO of a software company eh? Well he must be on the up and up then! No way he could possibly be badmouthing linux because he has a vested interest in seeing more windows boxen eh?
Theres really nothing new here. First he talks about the "number of Linux vulnerabilities", of course no distinguishing between core "linux" and the plehtora of other applications out there. Maybe we need to look at the ratio of security issue exposed software, daemon applications and the like, to the number of vulnerabilities? lets face it, for every network service, everybody and his brother has written a server for linux that speaks it. Guess what, yah thats alot, probably even alot more than windows by far.
Then he goes on to what sound to me like obviously embedded systems. Aircraft controls etc. So we are going to count security bugs in ftp servers against a system thats never going to be connected to a network, much less run an ftp server in the first place?
I agree with him of course, Linux should not be used in applications that require certain certifications until it has those certifications. Wow, big revelation there. Earth shattering even.
All in all this is a stupid article written by someone who is either a) stupid enough to not realise that his arguments are pointless or b) someone trying to attack linux for his own financial interest or maybe c) both of the above.
Thats a good poll, What is it, a, b, or c?
-Steve
Right, I did a report on something related to this years ago early in high school. See my mother was an X-Ray tech and she pointed me at some fun stuff. Thorium.
See X-Ray machines don't do so well at taking pictures of tissue. So to get a picture of your digestive tract or other organs, you need to add whats known as a "contrast solution". Well back in the 50s they had a good one that contained throium.
It was great, pictures rivaled what they can do today, and since alpha particles are stopped by paper, they should be harmless, and that 1400 year half life wont matter, right?
Didn't exactly work out that way. The radiation just slowly destroyed these peoples organs. Their liver, kidneys, etc. Nasty stuff.
-Steve
I just want to say that Jack Chick has brought so much pleasure into my life. I hope he does come out with a comic on this, I will buy it. I can't wait to find out how this is a trick by satan trying to pull the wool over our eyes and make us believe in evolution.
Of course he is doing this indirectly, but its obvious as soon as you trace the cause back to conspiracies within the Catholic church, which, correct me if I am wrong, unwittingly practices a form of Baal worship.
Excuse my while I go laugh until it hurts.
-Steve
Don't underestimate a true scammer. Chances are this is a number he picked out of the phone book... or the number of some other person that made a stick when he scammed them.
These people can be insanely clever. I know, I lived with one for a while and never even realised it until one day when I ran into his previous roomate.
Long story short, its the same scam always. They apear to be something, a vendor, a guy with a job, etc. Next thing you know, you are out money because you trusted them as much as you would have trusted anyone who was what they apeared to be. Then, they are gone.
If you have some way to contact them fine, they will talk to you, afterall, maybe they can find some new angle to use on you. I talked with a psychologist about them once, often they even come to believe their own lies. Afterall, if you can convince yourself, then its easier to convince others.
They can be slippery as hell too. SPread the scam around as much as possible. If you take one person too much you can get in trouble, bu tits alot harder to catch lots of little frauds all over the place, alot of people just don't want to deal with it... afterall... they can file police reports, and whatnot, in the end their money is gone anyway. The chances of recovering even a dime is slim to none.
My scammer had been writtin gbad checks to his previous landlord and then stealing their mail and taking the bounce notices from th ebank out. Got away with it for months until he disspeared to come live with me and they found all that mail in his room.
I couldn't convince them to even report it. They talked to a lawyer and he basically said "You wont get a dime out of him" so they dropped it.
I went to the police with a bounced 1800 check that he wrote me... and they took a report and um... oh yah, did nothing. One bounced check in a city this size, They didn't have time for that. by the time they could have gotten around to looking for him he was long gone, skipped town.
There is a mental condition known as anti-social behavior. Many of these people fit the mold on that one. I remember conversations late into the night over a bottle of wine with this guy, he wa sgenuinly likable on a social level, but something was always off. He had no sympathy for people out in the world.
When I told him that I heard people were selling rocks saying they were peices of the WTC, the 9/11 rubble he said wow, "I feel bad that I didn't think of that". Its not just a joke, he had that sincere tone about it.
Even after it was over he would see me on AIM for a little while. HE would send me IMs like nothing had changed. "Hey dude whats up?"...
-Steve
Its true. The only card key I have to go through is to get into the server room, which is, understandably, higher security.
The only other place I see them are the front doors to dorms, you need a card to enter the building, then once you are in, its keys.
It makes sense for dorm buildings. What do you do when you kick a student out or one leaves, or loses his keys? Sure maybe you rekey his room, but do you now have to rekey the building too? Issue new keys to everyone?
Now if he loses his ID, you take his old ID off the authorized list, issue him a new ID, and your done.
Are there more reasons? beats me, I don't work for campus police.
-Steve
Your right I did... but more so I forgot to read what I wrote... I meant draws not mates. And I would check the quote by my chess quotes book is in a box somewhere right now.
but I didn't put it in quotes.... I was paraphrasing.
-Steve
Its the US that he has been hiding from for the past 29 years or so.
Granted, he has only been "wanted" in the US for 12 years, he has been supposedly in hiding since 1975.
Japan is going to hand him over to the US, said it right in the article. He wouldn't have been committing passport violations if he hadn't been wanted in the US.
-Steve
Why? because we need it. (ok I work for a different univ. and not much for CCTV but we have swipe cards here and there).
The thing is Universities are great targets for small time criminals. Lots of people going in and out, many faces, unattended equipment. At least with swipe card access, you can be somewhat sure that people in the area are suposed to be there. It helps.
It doesn't stop door jacking of course, which was one of my favorite techniques at a previous job (wouldn't give me card access to some areas before 9 am, even though I started at 8 and often had jobs to do in there, so I would just door jack my way in, and get my work done)
Youd be amazed at the things that can go on on a campus. Some amount of security is important, theres basically 3 types of areas they need to secure. 1) places where people live (dorms... Frats are generally completly open and the U doesn't give a fuck), 2) places with lots of expensive computer equipment 3) Dangerous labs.
Just ask some student friends of mine who rented a house off campus last year. They threw some great parties, and had 11 people living in the house. There was so much in and out foot traffic that they had problems with people walking in off the street and stealing things.
Its easy for places with alot of people traffic to get a high profile and become a target.
-Steve
Well Fischer has always been politically incorrect. This is the same man that accused the russians of ruinin ghte game of chess by always playing for mates against eachother and always playing western masters for the win, and saying that women can't play chess because theres not a woman in the world he couldn't beat given knights odds. (not that there are more than a handful of men that could beat him with knights odds)
As a friend informs me, he had dissapeared back in the 70s because he believed the US government was out to get him. So in his mind he had been in hiding from the US for 26 years before he said that.
I guess the upshot is that we can now all expect a few more good crzy bobby fischer quotes in the near future.
Frankly i think its all pretty bogus. Ok Yugoslavia was under sanctions. Big deal. He went there to play chess. I think this entire mess shows an inflated sense of self importance for the US gov, or at least hypocracy. The UN matters when they agree with US and doesn't matter when they don't?
Hes an old coot who was one of the most well known chess grand masters ever. SO much so that he gave up his title and quit the game years before I was born, and I still know who he was. Just let him be, hes not hurting anyone.
Sure hes an asshole, but should bein gan asshole really be a crime?
-Steve