Flexibility and the strength of Open Source? There's a reason Apple doesn't want people to run MacOS X on those old machines... they're too slow and people will bitch about it and their reputation will suffer. That and they need to sell more iMacs to pay Steve's house payment.
Along with PGP, flight simulators were used by terrorists in the horrendous attacks of September 11th. We should ban open source flight simulators unless they provide a special government backdoor to monitor who is using them and where they are flying in the virtual world.
Actually I heard they went back and tested it another time and found it to be positive. As for finding anthrax in the wild.. that's all fine and good. It's a matter of statistics though. How many people have contracted anthrax in the last 100 years? 20? Now we have 4 cases in a *2 week* timespan. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce something unnatural is going on here. It doesn't necessarily mean Usama bin Laden's thugs are spreading anthrax though. It could be a bunch of anti-government geeks who are so insistent on defending "freedom" that they'll kill anyone who stands in their way. You laugh, but Michael has some really wacky and paranoid views on so-called censorship and rights. One would think he was imprisoned in a Soviet prison camp in another life.
Well, at least they're not that much more expensive at Thinkgeek than you can find them by searching shopper.com or Pricewatch. $289.99 on Thinkgeek and about $280-$290 from reputable dealers on the shopper.com search. This is better than $25 bucks for a case of those lame "energy" drinks on Thinkgeek.
The thing you're missing though is that the PGP division of NAI encompassed a lot more products than the desktop mail encryption program. Gauntlet (a damn good firewall), E-Business Server (I still don't know what the hell that is), CyberCop Scanner, PGP Desktop (which includes the desktop VPN client product, personal firewalls, disk encryption, as well as the mail stuff). Personally I couldn't give a damn what happens to PGP since I can just go and download GPG and use it instead but there is no open source alternative to Gauntlet. You're stuck with going to Symantec's firewall (formerly Axent's Raptor), or Sidewinder if you want to stick with proxy based firewalls. If you're not concerned with security of anything higher than layer 3 you can probably settle for Firewall-1 or a Cisco PIX. Hopefully NAI will find a good buyer for these PGP product lines though. It'd be a shame to lose them.
Well, the whole point of that ideology is that you help your enemy's enemy defeat your enemy, then kill them before they can react. We didn't do that with the USSR and spent 50 years jerking off in a Cold War. The first thing we need to do after destroying the Taliban is to kill the Northern Alliance leaders and establish a democracy.
Having a unique ID number which is accessible to anyone permits cross-correlating databases and other methods of mining data and constructing profiles of people. Also, if there was a bar code or similar machine-readable encoding of the number on the ID card, then soon anyone (airline, dentist, grocery store, border guard, building security) would start swiping the card and recording our movements and activities in a way that would be very easy to combine in giant databases.
You described my credit cards and my social security number. If you work in the United States you should have a social security number. If you don't then you're probably working here illegally. We might as well just take the next step and have a national ID card that uses your SSN since everyone probably memorized it already anyway.
I've got a Casio Databank watch that I don't wear anymore. The battery in that is going on 7 years. The last 3 or 4 years the "BATT" display has been on constantly. I'm actually kind of amused to see how long it'll actually last. The funny thing is that it still keeps damn good time.
What is this question doing on Slashdot? People please, if you work for the US government you have an obligation at this point to shut the hell up. IT security is one of the things falling under increasing scrutiny during the heightened state of world events and the last thing we need are Ask Slashdot questions like "What government agencies run UNIX". What's next? "What firewall does your government site run?" or "What protocols does your government site allow through their firewall?". We don't need to be broadcasting anymore information to the bad guys than they already have.
If the Taliban wants to place their own citizens in military targets that they know will be bombed in order to get them killed then so be it. They are casualties of war unfortunately. Just another side effect of having radicals in power in any country. The civilized world wouldn't put innocent civilians in military complexes to act as human shields. You cannot negotiate with terrorists. They're no different than teenage children.
*shrug* My Ericsson R280LX has a low profile battery that takes up the entire back. I really couldn't care less since it's in a carrying case with a belt clip all the time. As for design issues. What's there to design? I like my phones black or dark gray with a simple to use keypad and a nice well lit display. I don't need neon colors, polka dots, or LCD screens the size of a palm pilot.. it's a phone. I use it to make phone calls.:-)
I don't know about anyone else, but my wireless experience has been less than thrilling. I've got a D-Link access point at home and a D-Link wireless broadband gateway at another site and a D-Link DWL-650 wireless card in my laptop. it seems that either place I go I can only go about 40 or 50 feet away (through several walls) from the wireless access points before my signal drops off completely. I'm not worried about whackers attacking my wireless LAN.. hell, I can barely pick up my access point in my living room.
While it is something to take very seriously, I'm still more concerned about hijackers. Why should terrorists trouble themselves with biological weapons when they can wreak such mayhem with box cutters?
I'm not concerned at all anymore with hijackings. In fact, I would reasonably argue that we're not going to have another hijacking for a long time now. Why? Because the hijackers now know that the procedures have changed. Pilots aren't going to be cooperative anymore. Passengers aren't going to sit back and let them control the situation. It is practically impossible to get a bomb or gun on an aircraft these days. That means the only thing you may face is a knife they someone got through security. Unless these guys are Bruce Lee, 60 people on an airplane can easily overpower a group of 4 or 5 hijackers as long as they maintain in their mind that there is no way a gun or bomb could be on the plane.
Anyway, the point is, the suicide hijackers are probably planning something else at this point (bioterrorism, chemical weapons, truck bombs, etc.) and the non-suicidal hijackers are not stupid enough to hijack a plane at this point when they KNOW that everyone is going to assume the plane will be used as a weapon and will not cooperate with them. That's all the hijackers used to have going for them and these terrorists blew it for them.. literally.
And how exactly can a cheap laptop fingerprint scanner tell the difference between your finger whether you're concious or unconcious? Besides, you don't need to be unconcious for someone to force your finger onto a scanner. Now, the way to make this decent is to use two factors... the password AND your finger.
You don't need to be dead for me to use your finger to access your computer. Chances are you're probably a scrawny computer geek in the first place. Any football player on your high school football team will be able to force your finger onto the pad to decrypt all your child pornography.
The Korean auto maker Fubaritsu deployed 300,000 Linux based desktops throughout their operation last quarter. Imaginatron announced they will be rolling out over 3 million desktops based on SuSE next May, and another 150,000 desktop systems at Microsoft will be converted to Debian GNU/Linux.
Let's face it, Linux isn't good on the desktop. If you're an engineer or a programmer it's great, but for the average secretary, office manager, or non-techie it is absolutely horrible. Why do people want to put Linux where it doesn't fit? That's worse than Microsoft claiming Windows2000 is a production data center capable server OS. Give me a break.
Which begs the question, why doesn't Mozilla have this feature? At least, I haven't been able to find it. There has been NO time in the past 5 years I have ever had a reason to view an animated GIF. They've all been advertisements. What's going to be next? MPEG movies in the banner ad space? Will I need to download a 5 meg movie for every 50k page worth of content I want to browse?
And another thing... why does Slashdot move their adserver so we can more easily block the ads? I'd rather just click "block all images from this server" and be done with it. Unfortunately their ad servers serves up the images from the same server their normal images come from. I still block them but the site looks like crap without any images.
I think you've just about summed up everyone's opinion in one concise insightful message. Well done. I wouldn't mind the ads if these didn't move around and flash! I simply cannot concentrate on reading an article when there is an advertisement pulsating like a strobe light in the center of the text. WTF is that?!
Actually that's not far off. These god damned banner ads that that flicker make me worry I'm going to have a seizure or something. Whoever makes those should be shot.
There should be an exponential scale for the cost of a domain name. The first one would be some small amount per year, the next would be that to some power, and so on. Pretty soon these businesses won't think it's such a good idea to own 20 domain names when it costs them $50 million a year to do it. It will stop domain squatters in no time flat. Also,.com domains should require a valid proof of a business,.org should only be individuals and non-profit organizations, etc. THAT is the way the DNS was meant to be. Make it too expensive for these squatters to exist and they will blow away.
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Flexibility and the strength of Open Source? There's a reason Apple doesn't want people to run MacOS X on those old machines... they're too slow and people will bitch about it and their reputation will suffer. That and they need to sell more iMacs to pay Steve's house payment.
Along with PGP, flight simulators were used by terrorists in the horrendous attacks of September 11th. We should ban open source flight simulators unless they provide a special government backdoor to monitor who is using them and where they are flying in the virtual world.
Actually I heard they went back and tested it another time and found it to be positive. As for finding anthrax in the wild.. that's all fine and good. It's a matter of statistics though. How many people have contracted anthrax in the last 100 years? 20? Now we have 4 cases in a *2 week* timespan. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce something unnatural is going on here. It doesn't necessarily mean Usama bin Laden's thugs are spreading anthrax though. It could be a bunch of anti-government geeks who are so insistent on defending "freedom" that they'll kill anyone who stands in their way. You laugh, but Michael has some really wacky and paranoid views on so-called censorship and rights. One would think he was imprisoned in a Soviet prison camp in another life.
Well, at least they're not that much more expensive at Thinkgeek than you can find them by searching shopper.com or Pricewatch. $289.99 on Thinkgeek and about $280-$290 from reputable dealers on the shopper.com search. This is better than $25 bucks for a case of those lame "energy" drinks on Thinkgeek.
The thing you're missing though is that the PGP division of NAI encompassed a lot more products than the desktop mail encryption program. Gauntlet (a damn good firewall), E-Business Server (I still don't know what the hell that is), CyberCop Scanner, PGP Desktop (which includes the desktop VPN client product, personal firewalls, disk encryption, as well as the mail stuff). Personally I couldn't give a damn what happens to PGP since I can just go and download GPG and use it instead but there is no open source alternative to Gauntlet. You're stuck with going to Symantec's firewall (formerly Axent's Raptor), or Sidewinder if you want to stick with proxy based firewalls. If you're not concerned with security of anything higher than layer 3 you can probably settle for Firewall-1 or a Cisco PIX. Hopefully NAI will find a good buyer for these PGP product lines though. It'd be a shame to lose them.
Well, the whole point of that ideology is that you help your enemy's enemy defeat your enemy, then kill them before they can react. We didn't do that with the USSR and spent 50 years jerking off in a Cold War. The first thing we need to do after destroying the Taliban is to kill the Northern Alliance leaders and establish a democracy.
Having a unique ID number which is accessible to anyone permits cross-correlating databases and other methods of mining data and constructing profiles of people. Also, if there was a bar code or similar machine-readable encoding of the number on the ID card, then soon anyone (airline, dentist, grocery store, border guard, building security) would start swiping the card and recording our movements and activities in a way that would be very easy to combine in giant databases.
You described my credit cards and my social security number. If you work in the United States you should have a social security number. If you don't then you're probably working here illegally. We might as well just take the next step and have a national ID card that uses your SSN since everyone probably memorized it already anyway.
I can see it now:
"Hey Steve.. I see you down at the gym an awful lot these days running on the treadmill. Trying to get in shape?"
"No, just charging up my $^@#@!* watch again."
I've got a Casio Databank watch that I don't wear anymore. The battery in that is going on 7 years. The last 3 or 4 years the "BATT" display has been on constantly. I'm actually kind of amused to see how long it'll actually last. The funny thing is that it still keeps damn good time.
What is this question doing on Slashdot? People please, if you work for the US government you have an obligation at this point to shut the hell up. IT security is one of the things falling under increasing scrutiny during the heightened state of world events and the last thing we need are Ask Slashdot questions like "What government agencies run UNIX". What's next? "What firewall does your government site run?" or "What protocols does your government site allow through their firewall?". We don't need to be broadcasting anymore information to the bad guys than they already have.
Maybe in 6 more years we may get a native port of Half-Life from Loki. :-)
If the Taliban wants to place their own citizens in military targets that they know will be bombed in order to get them killed then so be it. They are casualties of war unfortunately. Just another side effect of having radicals in power in any country. The civilized world wouldn't put innocent civilians in military complexes to act as human shields. You cannot negotiate with terrorists. They're no different than teenage children.
*shrug* My Ericsson R280LX has a low profile battery that takes up the entire back. I really couldn't care less since it's in a carrying case with a belt clip all the time. As for design issues. What's there to design? I like my phones black or dark gray with a simple to use keypad and a nice well lit display. I don't need neon colors, polka dots, or LCD screens the size of a palm pilot.. it's a phone. I use it to make phone calls. :-)
The backside of my cell phone has this interesting little gadget called a "battery".
Hmm.. that is disturbing. I guess I should've bought the Linksys access point. :-) Maybe I need an external antenna.
I don't know about anyone else, but my wireless experience has been less than thrilling. I've got a D-Link access point at home and a D-Link wireless broadband gateway at another site and a D-Link DWL-650 wireless card in my laptop. it seems that either place I go I can only go about 40 or 50 feet away (through several walls) from the wireless access points before my signal drops off completely. I'm not worried about whackers attacking my wireless LAN.. hell, I can barely pick up my access point in my living room.
While it is something to take very seriously, I'm still more concerned about hijackers. Why should terrorists trouble themselves with biological weapons when they can wreak such mayhem with box cutters?
I'm not concerned at all anymore with hijackings. In fact, I would reasonably argue that we're not going to have another hijacking for a long time now. Why? Because the hijackers now know that the procedures have changed. Pilots aren't going to be cooperative anymore. Passengers aren't going to sit back and let them control the situation. It is practically impossible to get a bomb or gun on an aircraft these days. That means the only thing you may face is a knife they someone got through security. Unless these guys are Bruce Lee, 60 people on an airplane can easily overpower a group of 4 or 5 hijackers as long as they maintain in their mind that there is no way a gun or bomb could be on the plane.
Anyway, the point is, the suicide hijackers are probably planning something else at this point (bioterrorism, chemical weapons, truck bombs, etc.) and the non-suicidal hijackers are not stupid enough to hijack a plane at this point when they KNOW that everyone is going to assume the plane will be used as a weapon and will not cooperate with them. That's all the hijackers used to have going for them and these terrorists blew it for them.. literally.
And how exactly can a cheap laptop fingerprint scanner tell the difference between your finger whether you're concious or unconcious? Besides, you don't need to be unconcious for someone to force your finger onto a scanner. Now, the way to make this decent is to use two factors... the password AND your finger.
You don't need to be dead for me to use your finger to access your computer. Chances are you're probably a scrawny computer geek in the first place. Any football player on your high school football team will be able to force your finger onto the pad to decrypt all your child pornography.
The Korean auto maker Fubaritsu deployed 300,000 Linux based desktops throughout their operation last quarter. Imaginatron announced they will be rolling out over 3 million desktops based on SuSE next May, and another 150,000 desktop systems at Microsoft will be converted to Debian GNU/Linux.
Let's face it, Linux isn't good on the desktop. If you're an engineer or a programmer it's great, but for the average secretary, office manager, or non-techie it is absolutely horrible. Why do people want to put Linux where it doesn't fit? That's worse than Microsoft claiming Windows2000 is a production data center capable server OS. Give me a break.
Which begs the question, why doesn't Mozilla have this feature? At least, I haven't been able to find it. There has been NO time in the past 5 years I have ever had a reason to view an animated GIF. They've all been advertisements. What's going to be next? MPEG movies in the banner ad space? Will I need to download a 5 meg movie for every 50k page worth of content I want to browse?
And another thing... why does Slashdot move their adserver so we can more easily block the ads? I'd rather just click "block all images from this server" and be done with it. Unfortunately their ad servers serves up the images from the same server their normal images come from. I still block them but the site looks like crap without any images.
I think you've just about summed up everyone's opinion in one concise insightful message. Well done. I wouldn't mind the ads if these didn't move around and flash! I simply cannot concentrate on reading an article when there is an advertisement pulsating like a strobe light in the center of the text. WTF is that?!
Actually that's not far off. These god damned banner ads that that flicker make me worry I'm going to have a seizure or something. Whoever makes those should be shot.
There should be an exponential scale for the cost of a domain name. The first one would be some small amount per year, the next would be that to some power, and so on. Pretty soon these businesses won't think it's such a good idea to own 20 domain names when it costs them $50 million a year to do it. It will stop domain squatters in no time flat. Also, .com domains should require a valid proof of a business, .org should only be individuals and non-profit organizations, etc. THAT is the way the DNS was meant to be. Make it too expensive for these squatters to exist and they will blow away.