However, if a person were to use key blanks to begin with, it can be done.
Get a bunch of blanks, file it down to be similar to your key making guesses as to which pins are masters, and go slower with those. As they said in the article, the idea was not so much the filing technique as the stepwise analsys of the locka nd key and attempting to find the master configuration in as few steps as possible.
Afterall, oftentimes the master is just one or two pins different from the regular keys. Once you know which pin(s) is master, it really becomes trivial to do this.
Im not saying that hes the brightest bulb in the circuit, and he certainly isn't deserveing of any sort of praise for the situations he got himself in. Hell, the first court date was for a car accident he had on his way back home from cheating on his girlfriend.
His cleanliness in this instance is, however, besides the point. The police, DA etc are professionals and should be treating each case (and especially the cases of people who are yet to be convicted of their crimes) equally. And its not going to matter whether your "the yahoo" (as my friend has been so affectionaly dubbed) or some high and mighty computer security expert who was making a statement. The police don't want to hear it and wont listen, their job is just to detain you and hold you for trial.
-Steve
Re:Good move, hope they don't get in trouble
on
Cryptome Log Subpoenaed
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Oh they can be bastards.
He can tell the Attourney general of MA to pound sand. However, if a warrent for his arrest is issued in MA, then he can be arrested if he comes here and is caught (which never happens)
Or... if he is ever arrested for any reason in NY, then even after being bailed out, the NY police will alert MA (since states share info on who they have warrent for) and the NY police will hold him for the MA police to come pick him up (I think for up to 90 days)
This happened to a friend of mine about 2 years ago. He had a warrent for his arrest in Waltham, MA (missed a court date) and lived in RI. RI police picked him up for something unrelated (long story). After a month he was bailed out, but wasn't released. After being bailed out, the RI police informed him that they were holding him for up to 90 days because MA has a warrent out for his arrest and they are holding him for the MA police to come pick him up. (amusingly he missed his court date and had a warrent issued for his arrest because he was in a RI holding cell and thus couldn't come up to MA for his hearing).
In short, yea he can tell the AG to pound sand, he can even come into MA with little to no fear of ever being caught (police here have better things to do than pull people over, and we don't play that dangerous game of letting the cities patrol the highways so they have more incentive to pull people over than keep traffic moving safely). But... he better be sure not to get arrested anywhere else in the US.
Profit loss? Excuse me? You didn't sell a radio... you still didn't sell a radio. Someone found a broken radio that YOU threw out and fixed it up, and now you want to cry foul?
Can you just hear the drip of my heart bleeding for your loss?
If you wanted profit from selling it, then you shouldn't have thrown it out. If you were so worried that someone might fix it up and get a freebie...then, aside from being a prick in my book, you should have disposed of it properly.
Wow, how silly of you. DO you really think that it is an effective use of employee time to be talking to people going through the trash and reporting them to the police?
What value does it provide to your company? Afterall, everythin gin the trash is stuff that someone decided was of no value to the company and could be sent off into the trash black hole.
So, if anything of value to the company was in there, then the problem is NOT that this dude is going through the dumpster, its that it was in there in the first place.
Here in MA we are much more sensible. If you are tossing it, then its fair game. QUite simple and effective. If you want it, then don't package it up like trash and leave it where you leave trash, because doing that is evidence "prima facie", if you will, that you have no use for it and, in fact, don't want it, and are not intending to derive any gain from it, as you either give it away for free, or pay someone to take it away.
See quite simple... you want it, don't throw it out. If the dude in the dumpster was finding anythin gof value you should leave him alone and instead fire the employee that was throwing out valuable things.
> Just as a piece of trivia, people used to say > "You jewed me down on that one." No, really.
Your joking right... no... people STILL say that. Hell, I say that. "Jews are cheap" is quite a common stereotype even today, and like most stereotypes its based as much in fact as fiction, or at least common perception of fact.
Never forget that just because we all live in the same land, we don't necissarily have all the same customs and ways of doing things. Based on ethnic background, religion etc people congregate differently and exchange ideas in little bubbles and that does translate into child rearing.
So are Jews cheap? some are, some arn't. However, there is a definite pattern of certain types of cheapness, a consiousness as to how their money is spent and who it is spent on, and a control of that flow of money.
One Jew we know is a nice guy, used to come over and hang out alot. Hes noted as cheap whenever it comes to certain things, he has a tendancy to go over the bill and divide it up at restraunts with an accuracy that most people avoid... at least in most circles I am in we just kinda try to pay about the same amount and leave it at that... noone ever calculates a tiop, we just leave enough so that we know we ovetipped at least a little. Whereas he will do so.
Then he moved to NYC and pays exhorberant rates for a place in Manhatten and pays $60 for less than an eighth of pot. (good stuff, or so I hear, but for those who don't know... thats expensive... worst than colledge student prices)
All in all, I like stereotypoes. Not because they are so useful in judging the character of an individual, but because they often do hold interesting insight into the patterns of interaction between people, and how certain groups of people are percieved by others.
A point whic is very unlikely to actually matter to anyone.
Until attempts are made to catch, arrest, and charge people with the "crime" of watching a DVD on their Linux box, the question over whether it is legal or not is a moot point.
Someone pointed out to me the other day an old military maxim... Never give an order that you know wont be followed, it only undermines your authority.
Well... WE of course meaning "some of us" since certainly not everyone on slashdot decided to join in the boycott. There are serveral factors here.
1) RMS called for the boycott.
This right here splits the community. There are people who will do anything that RMS suggests based on who suggested it. There are people who will deride and think stupid anything RMS suggests based on who said it, then there are those of us who are unaffected by who called for it.
2) SOme of us like patents and even software patents
I used to spend my time here arguing with them myself, but they are out there. Yup, not everyone has drunk the anti-patent cool-aide (or maybe they drank the pro-patent cool-aide, I forget:) ) They are wrong, but they are out there, and part of this community.
Then there are those who insist that osome patents are good and some are bad. And a subset of them who trhinks the Amazon patent in question is a bad one, and a subset that thinks its a good one.
3) We could have meant I
We think that this is entirely apropriate in the case that the speaker is Royalty, pregnant, or has MPD.
-Steve Who shouldn't psot after comming back from boring office holiday parties
Actually thats mostly true however SCSI has a real advantage.
SCSI devices are smarter than IDE. They can take a queue of several requests and order the physical disk access such that it is as efficient as possible, ie less head movement back and forth.
IDE drives however only do serial access. This means each request is serviced in the order that it comes in. This means more back and forth head motion.
Sure, over the course of a few mins that means nothing, and on many systems it still means nothing over time. However, many have noted, that on systems that do alot of disk access, SCSI drives will last longer than IDE.
(I will note that I have heard ofi a specific IDE controller that does some special mojo to help fix some of this, but I don't know much about it)
> So, this post, I think, makes an important point about the whole thing. Some > people seem to think this is violating your mind or something. It really isn't.
This is an issue that leaves me very very conflicted.
What are they really studying? You can call it marketing, you can call it advertising. In the end, it has but one overall name - manipulation.
This is the study of how to influence people. How do you frame the question such that the answer that comes back is the one you want. Con artists (be they grifters, politicians, or salesmen) do this stuff all the time. They learn what to say and to do to build up your trust.
Why? Is it because they deserve your trust? Sometimes, maybe. However often its just because they have something they want from you, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.
In the end, its all just taking the buisness of the con artist to the next level. Remember, con is short for confidence. They build up your confidence in them, in their product.
> So, you have control over the way you want to think about things. Even if > they researched your close relatives, they couldn't get to you unless you let > them.
The problem is really one of information overload. Let me relate an anecdote from my life. I met this dude named Andre. Nicest guy you ever met. Sure, I had reservations about him, he liked to name drop alot and that bothered me, but I figured maybe he was just insecure and felt he was impressing people, so I let it slide.
We moved in together, and every time it came time ot pay rent, there was some fiasco, and right as I was about to throw him out for it (2 months in) I ended up meeting up with his old roomate (somewhat randomly actually) and found out he had been writting bad checks for rent there, and stealing the bounced check notices out of the mail before the landlord ever saw them (they found the notices in his room after he took off)
He skipped town, and now the interesting part comes. Every person I told was shocked. They liked the guy, everyone did. Then... their second reaction was understanding. Suddenly all the peices fit. Someone who knew french mentioned "yea you know, I noticed that he wasn't actually fluent in french like he claimed, he missed some pretty simple phrases the one time..." etc etc. Everybody had something.
Life is complicated enough and there is enough going on for the average person to think about that we generally have to have some level of assumption involved in all of our interactions. We can't get to know every person that we meet so well as to be able to truely judge whether they can be trusted or not. We have to take some amount of what they say, a large amount, at face value.
As Scott Adams says - life is too complicated to be smart about everything all the time.
What we have here is research into how to exploit this fact. People who are paid, who make their money, by exploiting this "hole" in human interaction and using it to influence people to buy their product.
I would go as far as to label this a breech of the social contract. Living together they way what we do in a society, we are forced to have to make certain assumptions about people and what they say. It is not avoidable as the modes of interaction mean we interact with people before we have really seen "their metal" tested.
As such, this implicit assumption forms a social contract. An implicit agreement to truth. People who use techniques to frame questions and otherwise take advantage of these social assumptions are breaking that implicit agreement. They are parasites living on our society.
You could do better today as it is... making this technology quite the overkill.
encrypt you rmessage and post it all over town. Many people will stop to look at copies of it, only the intended recipient can actually read it (assuming you are using a large enough key etc etc etc)...
Or even better, use steganography to hide into in an image on a web page, then all you need its lots of traffic loading the image for whatever reason. Which of those thousands of accesses was the guy who knows how to read the message? Good luck figiuring it out.
Palm it and pass it with a handshake? Sure, its fun, and usefull sometimes. (Dude you got any trees? Sure man $50 an 8. Deal man.::shake::. Yo barkeep, another round please) However, sometimes, its just overkill.
Besides...why sugar cube sized? those buisness card size CDs are plenty small for "Casual contact passing". Or even USB drives... about the size of a lighter, I for one can easily palm something the size of a lighter long enough for the person I am talking to to forget I have it (a fool and his lighter are soon parted) and passing through casual contact with a small token in the palm of you rhand? Easy stuff.
You don't need sugar cube size memory devices... just get it on a USB drive and use a couple of potheads as couriers. Even better... hide a USB drive in a lighter... then its just a matter of knowing the right network of potheads... give the lighter to the right person and without even any extra knowledge you can easily have a 90% chance it will be in a specific other persons pocket within the next 48 hours.
Sure its not perfect but man... you could easily use lighters to move information through a network of people without them knowing.
In summary... you COULD use a mature version of this tech to solve the problem of moving data surreptitously, however, equally good eays exist now, this would just increase the amount you could move easily and quickly.
my problem is that your argument creates a definition for "too high" that doesn't have any real meaning.
Insurance has social value, no doubt about it. It is a service that benefits people overall and adds value to our society. I agree with that. The question is does the value it adds justify the price that people pay for it.
Is the percentage of my income that goes towards insurance truely justified (ok, I would have a hard time making that argument with my salary and my insurance costs take someone else who had a real car instead of a little rice rocket motorcycle and has a more "average" job...)
Im looking for a definition of "too high" based on real social value, because the standard definition of "too high" really ends up meaning "as much as we can get people to pay", which is really a quite anti-social way of viewing the world.
Now its true, that works out fine if people are rational and really understand and evaluate the prices they pay for things vs the value they get out of them. However, not living in such a world, IMNSHO I think real social value and actual market behavipour get quoite out of whack.
Your missing something about hospitals. I worked at one (in fact, one not far from Beth Isreal) for a couple of years (in IT no less) and in my experience the problem is with budgeting.
You see...hospitals don't work like companies. They (usually) are not for profit entities. There is no CEO, the central structure is a huge beauracracy. Its alot like a University.
Generally IT departments are not on the top of the list to recieve funding. Their budgets tend to be alot smaller than they really need. In fact, where I worked, the budget cycle happend, and IT ran out of their budget for buying new servers in about 4 months!
Now, when some big name research doctor said "give me 4 million to setup a lab to do stuff or im going somewhere else" they happily did it (I also noticed that the work orders I was doing for his little department had a funding code that listed as being from the US Army... neuroscience department... funny that...)
Which illustrates another point... budgeting is weird. Money comes from all manner of places, central udget, grants. All stuff the IT departments generally don't see any of except from their chargebacks. (and boy do they ever chargeback, we were charging departments $300 just to activate a network drop... activate... litterally just to go into a wiring closet and connect a patch cable! )
The problem is, nobody dies if IT is underfunded (at least not in a way that can easily be traced back and you can say "See, if IT had been better funded..."). They are also newer departments, not like Radiology thats been around for the better part of the last century.
Yes, and then if we define "too high" as "when people leave for competition" we can easily ignore the fact that most people don't actually do much shopping around, or that prices don't really differ that much from competitor to competitor and bruch all that off as simply meaning that the price isn't too high.
Pretty simple stuff indeed, when you ignore the fact that acutal human behaviour isn't really governed by rationality and that the world ha sfar too many things like insurance, etc for the average consumer to actually have the time to "shop around" and find good deals.
But thats ok, because the fact that people don't do it just means the price isn't too high...
Hmmm I dunno where YOU are but here in MA, basic insurance is regulated to the dollar amount. Check basic einsurance rates anywhere and every insurance agent will tell you the same thing and quote you the same price "It doesn't matter where you go, the state sets the price on basic insurance". (Beyond basic they do what they wantr mostly, but, they can't do jack about the basic rate, which I do believe is how they enforce the "Safe Driver" program that causes your insurance rate to go up or down based on either accidents or years of accident free driving respectivly)
Course, thats not congress, its state gov but... same princible (tho, id argue that since state government is more legitimate by virtue of being closer to the people, so more regulation locally makes sense, but thats out of scope and doesn't apply within the empire anymore)
It is a major problem, alot of people really are just stupid. Then again... is 100 MPH on a busy highway too fast? Whats busy? Do remember that a bike is quite an agile machine in the hands of a skilled rider. Their size and power/weight ratio (both for accelration and braking) give them some real advantages over cars when it comes to the ability for a skilled rider to avoid an accident. (tho depending on your definition of busy, 100 MPH probably is a bit too fast, tho not for an uncrowded highway:) )
All in all, I think education is really the answer for these problems. The MSF courses are just awesome and I think anyone who is even considering a bike should take one.
I really don't get some riders tho... esp3cially harley riders actually. riding around with novelty helmets and no face sheild... using a ski mask in the winter to stay warm...
motocycle riding can be uncomfortable enough at times, I see no need to reduce safety just so you can get slammed in the face (and whereever else... if its exposed skin SOMETHING is going to impact it, garaunteed!) with road debris. Fuck, even rain drops kinda sting when they hit your face at 40+ MPH.
As a motorcycle rider, I always wear my helmet... it would be crazy to do otherwise on any sort of real riding. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would even want to do it, its just not comfortable! (fuck safety, getting gravel and bugs in the face at speed hurts, ive fallen off my bike several times, and not a single time has my helmet impacted the ground, but every time I ride bugs and gravel hit my face sheild)
All that said, I am not convinced that it shouyld be required. I have yet to actually see anyone making the claim of "Increased costs of healthcare" actually produce figures to back it up.
Just costing more per injury isn't enough either. What are the percentages? HOW much more does it cost, and not just in specific "worst case" but overall. An increased death rate, for example, would likely decrease the overall cost of medical care for people not wearing helmets.
All that said... why not just mandate that insurance companies (both health and auto) don't have to pay for at-fault head and neck injuries of riders not wearing helmets, and then let them be?
Well thats exactly why I said I had to answer as if the reader is a student where _I_ work. Here outbound is the problem. Outbound bandwith is far exceeding inbound. Which means that what our students download is vastly less than what others are trying to download from them.
As for p2p...I think this speaks to the poor natur eof current P2P setups in how they use the network. I think that alot of work is needed to really make these services play nice.
Out of everything I have seen... I think freenet is probably the best I have seen for asny of this. I wish I had kept up on its development, I need to check them out again. Basically creating huge search cache repositoties based on searches that time out their content... wonderful stuff.
All we need are a few local nodes, and after the first time one of our people doenloads any content, bang! its cached locally and until it falls off the stack, nobody here ever has to use the main net connections to get that content again.
Ok.... I will answer pretending that you go to the University I work for... The problem isn't YOU sucking down MP3s and movies. Its not even everyone else doing it. Its you SHARING them.
You may notice that accessing someone elses PC on the network here goes pretty quick, but loading a web page is slow. You may try to ssh in from outside and find that slow.
Why?
Because inbound or internal bandwidth isn't a problem at all... its outbound. Its not the people AT the university using the network... its the people outside who are finding the stuff you are sharing and downloading it that are causing the vast majority of the bandwith usage.
All in all the answer, which I hate to give, is that people at dorms need to stop with the offering to the world of files on p2p systems. The bandwith usage is too great and it does most certainly hinder other peoples use of the network.
Your tutiton and that of your fellow students "pays" for the network (actually your tuition may pay for alot less than you think, the life blood of most Universities is the endowment, some schools could even run off it and not charge Tuition, Harvard being one example)
Sharing MP3s with the world is essentially allocating resources to people not in the University community. Now I don't mean to say thats bad or there is no good in doing it, however, when it becomes the single largest use of bandwith and interferes with others use of resources... then something bad is certanly going on.
Now here, rate limiting is defense of our network as the traffic caused by p2p filesharing is causing some of the routing equipment to run right up against its max capacity, and thats not a good way to be. If we try to throw more bandwith at it, we will just be more attractive to people downloading, and usage goes up to utilize the bandwith... rate limiting is the only scenario with a win there.
So the next time you can access across the boarders of your own network with reasonable speed, be glad p2p is rate limited. And the next time you can downlaod something via a p2p, again be glad that it wasn't shut off completely.
Bandwith is a limited resource... students need to learn to share it and use it wisely.
However that argument still misses an important point.
We are arguing that we shoul dbe ALLOWED to use P2P because of its many uses, essentially an argument against a form of "guilt by association". That we should be allowed to continue to use p2p (not that much allowing needs be done, since it can't really be stopped) as we see fit, even though some people use it for things that they maybe shouldn't (or maybe should, given ones point of view)
Palladium is another beast entirely. The fear is that once it is implimented it will stop us from using our own computers as we see fit, and will take control away from the owners of the computers and put it in the hands of large corperations.
It may mean (and I say may as it seems most all of this is speculation) that we will have the simple choice of not upgrading our hardware, and not buying new computers, or on the other hand, buying new hardware and not being aloowed to run the OS and or software that we want.
The two are very different beasts. Both argumnenbts are essentially the same... simply put, that the person who owns a computer should be allowed to use his system as he sees fit, and without prior restraint on his activities, (at least until he personally actually uses those resources to break the law or otherwise harm others).
Acedemia is great. You tend not to have that "Corperate Bottom Line" mentality, and things are just... nicer.
Great benefits like being able to take classes for free. What company is going ot pay for you to take classes that have nothing whatsoever to do with your job?... and 2 per semester at that! Day classes even!
I have a reasonable work schedual (~35/hr/week unless we are in a start of semester project crunch or the shit otherwise hits the fan), a reasonable amount of vacation (everyone should get 4 weeks vacation damnit), and cool people.
Frankly, I will be quite happy to never work for a for-profit again.
English is a language that has evoilved through years of people using it to communicate with eachother.
Grammar is a set of rules that were made through the study of english. I would say, given the wide occurance and ability of people to understand the meaning being conveyed that it is actually the rules of grammar that are incorrect as they have not evolved to include the common usage.
-Steve
Re:Ignorance is beaming
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 1
Could be worst, he could be one of those people that feels the need to interject comments about how unfunny others jokes are, because he doesn't share their sense of humor.
And if you really don't think people laugh at holocaust jokes, maybe youd like to meet a jewish friend of mine who pissed herself laughing when someone made a comment about "Kosher Lampshades".
We already know fiber can be tapped. The question on whether it is "more secure" is whether the total cost in resources (manpower, equipment cose, time) is greater for tapping fiber than copper. If so, then it is more secure.
Thats the real metric.
If you are transmitting data that is worth it to the people in ctonrtol of the USS Jimmy Carter to intercept, and you are sending it over fiber under water, then damnit, you had better take more precautions. Security is risk management afterall. Security measures only need to be adequet to manage the risk.
Slashdot Mirror
However, if a person were to use key blanks to begin with, it can be done.
Get a bunch of blanks, file it down to be similar to your key making guesses as to which pins are masters, and go slower with those. As they said in the article, the idea was not so much the filing technique as the stepwise analsys of the locka nd key and attempting to find the master configuration in as few steps as possible.
Afterall, oftentimes the master is just one or two pins different from the regular keys. Once you know which pin(s) is master, it really becomes trivial
to do this.
-Steve
Im not saying that hes the brightest bulb in the circuit, and he certainly isn't deserveing of any sort of praise for the situations he got himself in. Hell, the first court date was for a car accident he had on his way back home from cheating on his girlfriend.
His cleanliness in this instance is, however, besides the point. The police, DA etc are professionals and should be treating each case (and especially the cases of people who are yet to be convicted of their crimes) equally. And its not going to matter whether your "the yahoo" (as my friend has been so affectionaly dubbed) or some high and mighty computer security expert who was making a statement. The police don't want to hear it and wont listen, their job is just to detain you and hold you for trial.
-Steve
Oh they can be bastards.
He can tell the Attourney general of MA to pound sand. However, if a warrent for his arrest is issued in MA, then he can be arrested if he comes here and is caught (which never happens)
Or... if he is ever arrested for any reason in NY, then even after being bailed out, the NY police will alert MA (since states share info on who they have warrent for) and the NY police will hold him for the MA police to come pick him up (I think for up to 90 days)
This happened to a friend of mine about 2 years ago. He had a warrent for his arrest in Waltham, MA (missed a court date) and lived in RI. RI police picked him up for something unrelated (long story). After a month he was bailed out, but wasn't released. After being bailed out, the RI police informed him that they were holding him for up to 90 days because MA has a warrent out for his arrest and they are holding him for the MA police to come pick him up.
(amusingly he missed his court date and had a warrent issued for his arrest because he was in a RI holding cell and thus couldn't come up to MA for his hearing).
In short, yea he can tell the AG to pound sand, he can even come into MA with little to no fear of ever being caught (police here have better things to do than pull people over, and we don't play that dangerous game of letting the cities patrol the highways so they have more incentive to pull people over than keep traffic moving safely). But... he better be sure not to get arrested anywhere else in the US.
-Steve
SO I am a troll now. Amusing.
Profit loss? Excuse me? You didn't sell a radio... you still didn't sell a radio. Someone found a broken radio that YOU threw out and fixed it up, and now you want to cry foul?
Can you just hear the drip of my heart bleeding for your loss?
If you wanted profit from selling it, then you shouldn't have thrown it out. If you were so worried that someone might fix it up and get a freebie...then, aside from being a prick in my book, you should have disposed of it properly.
Don't blame the recycler.
-Steve
Wow, how silly of you. DO you really think that it is an effective use of employee time to be talking to people going through the trash and reporting them to the police?
What value does it provide to your company? Afterall, everythin gin the trash is stuff that someone decided was of no value to the company and could be sent off into the trash black hole.
So, if anything of value to the company was in there, then the problem is NOT that this dude is going through the dumpster, its that it was in there in the first place.
Here in MA we are much more sensible. If you are tossing it, then its fair game. QUite simple and effective. If you want it, then don't package it up like trash and leave it where you leave trash, because doing that is evidence "prima facie", if you will, that you have no use for it and, in fact, don't want it, and are not intending to derive any gain from it, as you either give it away for free, or pay someone to take it away.
See quite simple... you want it, don't throw it out. If the dude in the dumpster was finding anythin gof value you should leave him alone and instead fire the employee that was throwing out valuable things.
much more sensible.
-Steve
> Just as a piece of trivia, people used to say
> "You jewed me down on that one." No, really.
Your joking right... no... people STILL say that. Hell, I say that. "Jews are cheap" is quite a common stereotype even today, and like most stereotypes its based as much in fact as fiction, or at least common perception of fact.
Never forget that just because we all live in the same land, we don't necissarily have all the same customs and ways of doing things. Based on ethnic background, religion etc people congregate differently and exchange ideas in little bubbles and that does translate into child rearing.
So are Jews cheap? some are, some arn't. However, there is a definite pattern of certain types of cheapness, a consiousness as to how their money is spent and who it is spent on, and a control of that flow of money.
One Jew we know is a nice guy, used to come over and hang out alot. Hes noted as cheap whenever it comes to certain things, he has a tendancy to go over the bill and divide it up at restraunts with an accuracy that most people avoid... at least in most circles I am in we just kinda try to pay about the same amount and leave it at that... noone ever calculates a tiop, we just leave enough so that we know we ovetipped at least a little. Whereas he will do so.
Then he moved to NYC and pays exhorberant rates for a place in Manhatten and pays $60 for less than an eighth of pot. (good stuff, or so I hear, but for those who don't know... thats expensive... worst than colledge student prices)
All in all, I like stereotypoes. Not because they are so useful in judging the character of an individual, but because they often do hold interesting insight into the patterns of interaction between people, and how certain groups of people are percieved by others.
-Steve
Oddly I dunno if it was macrovision but I ran into just this recently.
At home its PS/2 -> TV direct. Its my game machine and DVD player...its sweet.
I went over a friends house one night, and after she put her kid to bed we got out the playstation and threw in boondock saints.
Her VCR is an old one...a top loader even! and boy did it ever not work. GTA: Vice city...played fine. Put in the movie, and it was all fucked up.
SO next week I came over with my own VCR, worked fine. No problems at all.
-Steve
A point whic is very unlikely to actually matter to anyone.
Until attempts are made to catch, arrest, and charge people with the "crime" of watching a DVD on their Linux box, the question over whether it is legal or not is a moot point.
Someone pointed out to me the other day an old military maxim... Never give an order that you know wont be followed, it only undermines your authority.
-Steve
Well... WE of course meaning "some of us" since certainly not everyone on slashdot decided to join in the boycott. There are serveral factors here.
:) ) They are wrong, but they are out there, and part of this community.
1) RMS called for the boycott.
This right here splits the community. There are people who will do anything that RMS suggests based on who suggested it. There are people who will deride and think stupid anything RMS suggests based on who said it, then there are those of us who are unaffected by who called for it.
2) SOme of us like patents and even software patents
I used to spend my time here arguing with them myself, but they are out there. Yup, not everyone has drunk the anti-patent cool-aide (or maybe they drank
the pro-patent cool-aide, I forget
Then there are those who insist that osome patents are good and some are bad. And a subset of them who trhinks the Amazon patent in question is a bad one, and a subset that thinks its a good one.
3) We could have meant I
We think that this is entirely apropriate in the case that the speaker is Royalty, pregnant, or has MPD.
-Steve
Who shouldn't psot after comming back from boring office holiday parties
Actually thats mostly true however SCSI has a real advantage.
SCSI devices are smarter than IDE. They can take a queue of several requests and order the physical disk access such that it is as efficient as possible, ie less head movement back and forth.
IDE drives however only do serial access. This means each request is serviced in the order that it comes in. This means more back and forth head motion.
Sure, over the course of a few mins that means nothing, and on many systems it still means nothing over time. However, many have noted, that on systems that do alot of disk access, SCSI drives will last longer than IDE.
(I will note that I have heard ofi a specific IDE controller that does some special mojo to help fix some of this, but I don't know much about it)
-Steve
> So, this post, I think, makes an important point about the whole thing. Some
> people seem to think this is violating your mind or something. It really isn't.
This is an issue that leaves me very very conflicted.
What are they really studying? You can call it marketing, you can call it advertising. In the end, it has but one overall name - manipulation.
This is the study of how to influence people. How do you frame the question such that the answer that comes back is the one you want. Con artists (be they grifters, politicians, or salesmen) do this stuff all the time. They learn what to say and to do to build up your trust.
Why? Is it because they deserve your trust? Sometimes, maybe. However often its just because they have something they want from you, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.
In the end, its all just taking the buisness of the con artist to the next level. Remember, con is short for confidence. They build up your confidence in them, in their product.
> So, you have control over the way you want to think about things. Even if
> they researched your close relatives, they couldn't get to you unless you let
> them.
The problem is really one of information overload. Let me relate an anecdote from my life. I met this dude named Andre. Nicest guy you ever met. Sure, I had reservations about him, he liked to name drop alot and that bothered me, but I figured maybe he was just insecure and felt he was impressing people, so I let it slide.
We moved in together, and every time it came time ot pay rent, there was some fiasco, and right as I was about to throw him out for it (2 months in) I ended up meeting up with his old roomate (somewhat randomly actually) and found out he had been writting bad checks for rent there, and stealing the bounced check notices out of the mail before the landlord ever saw them (they found the notices in his room after he took off)
He skipped town, and now the interesting part comes. Every person I told was shocked. They liked the guy, everyone did. Then... their second reaction was understanding. Suddenly all the peices fit. Someone who knew french mentioned "yea you know, I noticed that he wasn't actually fluent in french like he claimed, he missed some pretty simple phrases the one time..." etc etc. Everybody had something.
Life is complicated enough and there is enough going on for the average person to think about that we generally have to have some level of assumption involved in all of our interactions. We can't get to know every person that we meet so well as to be able to truely judge whether they can be trusted or not. We have to take some amount of what they say, a large amount, at face value.
As Scott Adams says - life is too complicated to be smart about everything all the time.
What we have here is research into how to exploit this fact. People who are paid, who make their money, by exploiting this "hole" in human interaction and using it to influence people to buy their product.
I would go as far as to label this a breech of the social contract. Living together they way what we do in a society, we are forced to have to make certain assumptions about people and what they say. It is not avoidable as the modes of interaction mean we interact with people before we have really seen "their metal" tested.
As such, this implicit assumption forms a social contract. An implicit agreement to truth. People who use techniques to frame questions and otherwise take advantage of these social assumptions are breaking that implicit agreement. They are parasites living on our society.
-Steve
You could do better today as it is... making this technology quite the overkill.
::shake::. Yo barkeep, another round please)
encrypt you rmessage and post it all over town. Many people will stop to look at copies of it, only the intended recipient can actually read it (assuming you are using a large enough key etc etc etc)...
Or even better, use steganography to hide into in an image on a web page, then all you need its lots of traffic loading the image for whatever reason. Which of those thousands of accesses was the guy who knows how to read the message? Good luck figiuring it out.
Palm it and pass it with a handshake? Sure, its fun, and usefull sometimes.
(Dude you got any trees? Sure man $50 an 8. Deal man.
However, sometimes, its just overkill.
Besides...why sugar cube sized? those buisness card size CDs are plenty small for "Casual contact passing". Or even USB drives... about the size of a lighter, I for one can easily palm something the size of a lighter long enough for the person I am talking to to forget I have it (a fool and his lighter are soon parted) and passing through casual contact with a small token in the palm of you rhand? Easy stuff.
You don't need sugar cube size memory devices... just get it on a USB drive and use a couple of potheads as couriers. Even better... hide a USB drive in a lighter... then its just a matter of knowing the right network of potheads...
give the lighter to the right person and without even any extra knowledge you can easily have a 90% chance it will be in a specific other persons pocket within the next 48 hours.
Sure its not perfect but man... you could easily use lighters to move information through a network of people without them knowing.
In summary... you COULD use a mature version of this tech to solve the problem of moving data surreptitously, however, equally good eays exist now, this would just increase the amount you could move easily and quickly.
-Steve
However what is "too high" what does it mean?
my problem is that your argument creates a definition for "too high" that doesn't have any real meaning.
Insurance has social value, no doubt about it. It is a service that benefits people overall and adds value to our society. I agree with that. The question is does the value it adds justify the price that people pay for it.
Is the percentage of my income that goes towards insurance truely justified (ok, I would have a hard time making that argument with my salary and my insurance costs take someone else who had a real car instead of a little rice rocket motorcycle and has a more "average" job...)
Im looking for a definition of "too high" based on real social value, because the standard definition of "too high" really ends up meaning "as much as we can get people to pay", which is really a quite anti-social way of viewing the world.
Now its true, that works out fine if people are rational and really understand and evaluate the prices they pay for things vs the value they get out of them. However, not living in such a world, IMNSHO I think real social value and actual market behavipour get quoite out of whack.
-Steve
Your missing something about hospitals. I worked at one (in fact, one not far from Beth Isreal) for a couple of years (in IT no less) and in my experience the problem is with budgeting.
You see...hospitals don't work like companies. They (usually) are not for profit entities. There is no CEO, the central structure is a huge beauracracy. Its alot like a University.
Generally IT departments are not on the top of the list to recieve funding. Their budgets tend to be alot smaller than they really need. In fact, where I worked, the budget cycle happend, and IT ran out of their budget for buying new servers in about 4 months!
Now, when some big name research doctor said "give me 4 million to setup a lab to do stuff or im going somewhere else" they happily did it (I also noticed that the work orders I was doing for his little department had a funding code that listed as being from the US Army... neuroscience department... funny that...)
Which illustrates another point... budgeting is weird. Money comes from all manner of places, central udget, grants. All stuff the IT departments generally don't see any of except from their chargebacks. (and boy do they ever chargeback, we were charging departments $300 just to activate a network drop... activate... litterally just to go into a wiring closet and connect a patch cable! )
The problem is, nobody dies if IT is underfunded (at least not in a way that can easily be traced back and you can say "See, if IT had been better funded..."). They are also newer departments, not like Radiology thats been around for the better part of the last century.
-Steve
Yes, and then if we define "too high" as "when people leave for competition" we can easily ignore the fact that most people don't actually do much shopping around, or that prices don't really differ that much from competitor to competitor and bruch all that off as simply meaning that the price isn't too high.
Pretty simple stuff indeed, when you ignore the fact that acutal human behaviour isn't really governed by rationality and that the world ha sfar too many things like insurance, etc for the average consumer to actually have the time to "shop around" and find good deals.
But thats ok, because the fact that people don't do it just means the price isn't too high...
-Steve
Hmmm I dunno where YOU are but here in MA, basic insurance is regulated to the dollar amount. Check basic einsurance rates anywhere and every insurance agent will tell you the same thing and quote you the same price "It doesn't matter where you go, the state sets the price on basic insurance". (Beyond basic they do what they wantr mostly, but, they can't do jack about the basic rate, which I
do believe is how they enforce the "Safe Driver" program that causes your insurance rate to go up or down based on either accidents or years of accident free driving respectivly)
Course, thats not congress, its state gov but... same princible (tho, id argue that since state government is more legitimate by virtue of being closer to the people, so more regulation locally makes sense, but thats out of scope and doesn't apply within the empire anymore)
-Steve
It is a major problem, alot of people really are just stupid. Then again... is 100 MPH on a busy highway too fast? Whats busy? Do remember that a bike is quite an agile machine in the hands of a skilled rider. Their size and power/weight ratio (both for accelration and braking) give them some real advantages over cars when it comes to the ability for a skilled rider to avoid an accident. :) )
(tho depending on your definition of busy, 100 MPH probably is a bit too fast, tho not for an uncrowded highway
All in all, I think education is really the answer for these problems. The MSF courses are just awesome and I think anyone who is even considering a bike should take one.
I really don't get some riders tho... esp3cially harley riders actually. riding around with novelty helmets and no face sheild... using a ski mask in the winter to stay warm...
motocycle riding can be uncomfortable enough at times, I see no need to reduce safety just so you can get slammed in the face (and whereever else... if its exposed skin SOMETHING is going to impact it, garaunteed!) with road debris. Fuck, even rain drops kinda sting when they hit your face at 40+ MPH.
some people are just plain strange.
-Steve
As a motorcycle rider, I always wear my helmet... it would be crazy to do otherwise on any sort of real riding. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would even want to do it, its just not comfortable! (fuck safety, getting gravel and bugs in the face at speed hurts, ive fallen off my bike several times, and not a single time has my helmet impacted the ground, but every time I ride bugs and gravel hit my face sheild)
All that said, I am not convinced that it shouyld be required. I have yet to actually see anyone making the claim of "Increased costs of healthcare" actually produce figures to back it up.
Just costing more per injury isn't enough either. What are the percentages? HOW much more does it cost, and not just in specific "worst case" but overall. An increased death rate, for example, would likely decrease the overall cost of medical care for people not wearing helmets.
All that said... why not just mandate that insurance companies (both health and auto) don't have to pay for at-fault head and neck injuries of riders not wearing helmets, and then let them be?
-Steve
Well thats exactly why I said I had to answer as if the reader is a student where
_I_ work. Here outbound is the problem. Outbound bandwith is far exceeding inbound. Which means that what our students download is vastly less than what others are trying to download from them.
As for p2p...I think this speaks to the poor natur eof current P2P setups in how they use the network. I think that alot of work is needed to really make these services play nice.
Out of everything I have seen... I think freenet is probably the best I have seen for asny of this. I wish I had kept up on its development, I need to check them out again. Basically creating huge search cache repositoties based on searches
that time out their content... wonderful stuff.
All we need are a few local nodes, and after the first time one of our people doenloads any content, bang! its cached locally and until it falls off the stack, nobody here ever has to use the main net connections to get that content again.
More p2p systems need to do stuff like that.
-Steve
Ok.... I will answer pretending that you go to the University I work for... The problem isn't YOU sucking down MP3s and movies. Its not even everyone else doing it. Its you SHARING them.
You may notice that accessing someone elses PC on the network here goes pretty quick, but loading a web page is slow. You may try to ssh in from outside and find that slow.
Why?
Because inbound or internal bandwidth isn't a problem at all... its outbound. Its not the people AT the university using the network... its the people outside who are finding the stuff you are sharing and downloading it that are causing the vast majority of the bandwith usage.
All in all the answer, which I hate to give, is that people at dorms need to stop with the offering to the world of files on p2p systems. The bandwith usage is too great and it does most certainly hinder other peoples use of the network.
Your tutiton and that of your fellow students "pays" for the network (actually your tuition may pay for alot less than you think, the life blood of most Universities is the endowment, some schools could even run off it and not charge Tuition, Harvard being one example)
Sharing MP3s with the world is essentially allocating resources to people not in the University community. Now I don't mean to say thats bad or there is no good in doing it, however, when it becomes the single largest use of bandwith and interferes with others use of resources... then something bad is certanly going on.
Now here, rate limiting is defense of our network as the traffic caused by p2p filesharing is causing some of the routing equipment to run right up against its max capacity, and thats not a good way to be. If we try to throw more bandwith at it, we will just be more attractive to people downloading, and usage goes up to utilize the bandwith... rate limiting is the only scenario with a win there.
So the next time you can access across the boarders of your own network with reasonable speed, be glad p2p is rate limited. And the next time you can downlaod something via a p2p, again be glad that it wasn't shut off completely.
Bandwith is a limited resource... students need to learn to share it and use it wisely.
-Steve
However that argument still misses an important point.
We are arguing that we shoul dbe ALLOWED to use P2P because of its many uses, essentially an argument against a form of "guilt by association". That we should be allowed to continue to use p2p (not that much allowing needs be done, since it can't really be stopped) as we see fit, even though some people use it for things that they maybe shouldn't (or maybe should, given ones point of view)
Palladium is another beast entirely. The fear is that once it is implimented it will stop us from using our own computers as we see fit, and will take control away from the owners of the computers and put it in the hands of large corperations.
It may mean (and I say may as it seems most all of this is speculation) that we will have the simple choice of not upgrading our hardware, and not buying new computers, or on the other hand, buying new hardware and not being aloowed to run the OS and or software that we want.
The two are very different beasts. Both argumnenbts are essentially the same... simply put, that the person who owns a computer should be allowed to use his system as he sees fit, and without prior restraint on his activities, (at least until he personally actually uses those resources to break the law or otherwise harm others).
-Steve
Hell yes. Amen my brother! Tell it like it is!
Acedemia is great. You tend not to have that "Corperate Bottom Line" mentality, and things are just... nicer.
Great benefits like being able to take classes for free. What company is going ot pay for you to take classes that have nothing whatsoever to do with your job?... and 2 per semester at that! Day classes even!
I have a reasonable work schedual (~35/hr/week unless we are in a start of semester project crunch or the shit otherwise hits the fan), a reasonable amount of vacation (everyone should get 4 weeks vacation damnit), and cool people.
Frankly, I will be quite happy to never work for a for-profit again.
-Steve
According to who?
English is a language that has evoilved through years of people using it to communicate with eachother.
Grammar is a set of rules that were made through the study of english. I would say, given the wide occurance and ability of people to understand the meaning being conveyed that it is actually the rules of grammar that are incorrect as they have not evolved to include the common usage.
-Steve
Could be worst, he could be one of those people that feels the need to interject comments about how unfunny others jokes are, because he doesn't share their sense of humor.
And if you really don't think people laugh at holocaust jokes, maybe youd like to meet a jewish friend of mine who pissed herself laughing when someone made a comment about "Kosher Lampshades".
-Steve
Well yea and?
We already know fiber can be tapped. The question on whether it is "more secure" is whether the total cost in resources (manpower, equipment cose, time) is greater for tapping fiber than copper. If so, then it is more secure.
Thats the real metric.
If you are transmitting data that is worth it to the people in ctonrtol of the USS Jimmy Carter to intercept, and you are sending it over fiber under water, then damnit, you had better take more precautions. Security is risk management afterall. Security measures only need to be adequet to manage the risk.
-Steve