When you get down to it, Facebook doesn't actually do something people need -- it is fun, people like it, but people had friends and social networks before Facebook, MySpace, BBSes, etc. People talk about how Facebook puts them in touch with lost friends; my experience has been that people are "in touch" only to the extent of clicking adding the person to their friends list, and then never speaking to them again. Farmville is not really a killer app, it is just an amusement. Facebook could vanish suddenly tomorrow, and I doubt that society would be seriously affected by its absence.
The idea, as I understand it, is that the handgun is a last resort -- when the grizzly is already biting down on your leg, you can shoot it in the head at point blank range, no marksmanship required.
That is a piece of metal, flung at speeds of around 350 m/s (1200 feet/second) with the only design specification of penetrating a human, flattening (or tumbling) and ripping through internal organs.
*ahem* guns are also good for killing wild animals. Please do not perpetuate the rhetoric about guns only being useful for killing people. I have met quite a few farmers who use small caliber rifles (.22lr,.22wmr,.223,.22-250,.204, etc.) for pest control, and plenty of people who hunt with firearms of various calibers --.22lr all the way up to.30-06 (depending on what they are hunting, of course). I have met people who have hunted using handguns, and people who carry handguns for protection when they are camping in grizzly bear territory (yes, bear attacks are rare, but when you have a grizzly biting down on your leg, you will want something to repel or kill it, and a handgun is a pretty good way to do that).
A poster further up (not you, I realize) basically says it's irresponsible to not luck up your gun in a safe, lest it be stolen). You're saying that a home invasion is a good reason to have a gun. But what good is a gun in a safe going to do in a home invasion?
That was my post that you are referring to, and it is worth noting that not everyone shares the view that it is irresponsible to not lock up your guns. Personally, I side with the statistics: more often than not, people are shot with their own guns, which were left unlocked, during home invasions. Some people like to sleep with a gun next to their bed (or even under their pillow); I am not one of them. In fact, when it comes to guns, I only own rifles; my guns are used only for hunting and practicing at a shooting range.
Frankly, if I had to choose a weapon for home defense, a handgun would not be my first choice. I would much rather have a weapon that requires less accurate aim to be effective; a shotgun, for example. The tactical advantages presented by handguns -- portability, concealment, etc. -- are not particularly important for home defense, and handguns are targets for theft (criminals love them precisely because of their tactical advantages). Like I said, though, not everyone agrees with me, and if you look through the comments in this thread, you will see a lot of people who think that owning a handgun is a good idea.
I seriously have to question the people who go out hunting animals when there's a perfectly good grocery store down the block.
Where I live, the idiots who populated the area 100+ years ago thought that killing all the wolves and mountain lions would be a good idea. Now, the only predator deer have to contend with is the one with a rifle. If it weren't for hunters, we would be overrun -- there are more deer here now than when the Europeans first arrived. It is unfortunate, but that is the state of affairs.
Even if that were not the case, and even if you do not like the argument that meat eaters should do their own killing, there is the simple fact that some meats are just not available in supermarkets. I have only seen venison in jerky-form at the supermarket, it is fairly hard to find duck meat, and I have never seen rabbit or dove being sold in supermarkets. Some people like variety; what is wrong with that?
Actually, yes, some people do use handguns for hunting. It is also not uncommon for people to bring a handgun with them when they go camping in grizzly bear territory, for protection.
First of all, there are people who hunt with handguns, as well as people who carry a handgun while they are out camping to protect themselves from bears. People also hunt using semiautomatic rifles (not as commonly as bolt or level actions, but some people prefer semiauto, and it is fairly common for a.22 caliber). Second, where exactly do you propose hunting rifles and ammunition be stored? Designated shacks in the woods? People need to be allowed to keep their own equipment in their homes; for some people, that might be very far from the nearest hunting grounds (yes, city dwellers go hunting too, and they might not be comfortable leaving their rifles unattended in a cabin for months at a time during the off-season).
Yes, it is true, handguns can be concealed more easily than long guns can, which is why criminals prefer handguns, and why more crimes are committed using handguns than long guns. The answer not an outright ban on all guns, or even an outright ban on handguns. Really, shootings are a symptom of a much broader problem in society, and addressing the symptom will only have marginal benefits. I would say that a much bigger problem than the availability of guns is that fact that in some communities, one out of every three men are incarcerated -- fathers, brothers, husbands, uncles. Take away the guns, and those communities will still have problems, and the criminals will resort to other weapons (knives, bats, etc.; right now, I hear about more muggings at knife point than at gun point, and I live in a fairly gun-friendly state).
Stabbing someone to death is not a silent crime; people usually scream, loudly, when they are stabbed. Stabbing also tends to result in the murderer being covered in the victim's blood (shooting may also have this effect, but not to the same extent).
Well that's the thing -- gun control has nothing at all to do with these sorts of planned assassinations. Do you think that handguns being illegal would have stopped this guy from obtaining one to carry out his attack? When it comes to gun control, the question is really about common criminals being able to obtain guns, not about people who are planning out their crimes.
Yeah, if you happen to be within a couple feet of your target. Beyond 10 feet, things start to change; you need more time to line up the shot, and believe me, the further away the target is, the harder it is to do that, especially with a handgun (the preferred firearm for criminals). This might be part of the reason why most shootings occur at close range (at least shootings that involve police officers):
Perhaps to avoid political fallout. You know, it doesn't look very good when you draw crosshairs labeled with a shooting victim's name, right over their location on a map. I am just going to guess that the website will be back online, minus one name, once the news stops reporting this story.
It would not, however, be difficult to stab them, beat them with a blunt object, hit them with a car, poison them, set their house on fire, or even just go extra-savage and punch and kick them to death. It is true, guns make killing a whole lot easier (at least in terms of the mechanics of it), but America is not the only developed nation where a large fraction of the population has guns, yet we seem to have a much (by orders of magnitude) higher murder rate. There is more to the story than just the availability of guns and ammunition.
Part of gun safety is storing guns in a manner that makes it difficult for people to steal them or for children to use them without adult supervision. A lot of guns used by criminals are stolen from law-abiding citizens' homes, who were not using a gun safe; a lot of school shootings involve guns that children take from their parents, which were not kept locked.
Their only reason is to kill people. Just ban guns already.
...or to kill animals. There are a lot of hunters in this country, who are not killing people with their guns -- and this is in spite of the fact that a typical deer hunting rifle is many times more powerful and has a much longer effective range than a handgun. The problem of gun violence in America is not a simple matter of the availability of guns, and it will not be solved by simply making guns illegal.
The problem is that fraudsters would not actually have to show their face or leave any physical traces of themselves anywhere if the system were all-digital. Someone could just sit back, send out a digital signature on a message that says, "Transfer $100k to this account," and walk away with the money -- no fingerprints, no need to show their face at a bank or post office, nothing. They could do it from another country if they wanted.
Digital signing would be a lot better if you had to carry a signing device (say, a card) into a bank to open your account, and part of that process was establishing a key that should be used for signing. Presumably, your computer would have an input device that could communicate with the token, to enable online banking and whatnot.
The problem with digital signing is that people need to be a lot more knowledgeable about it in order for it to be effective and reliable. Anyone can sign their name, and anyone can get a signature notarized. Yet only a small fraction of the population has the slightest clue about verifying public keys, and the CA system does little to mitigate this (mainly because the CAs are not as thorough as they should be when it comes to checking the certificates they sign). IMHO, the only real way to see a real benefit from a system that uses digital signing would be to require public keys to be registered with the bank in person, not online, and not using a CA. Why establish a system that makes it easier to commit fraud anonymously and remotely?
Public key crypto is great, but claiming that a digital signature is equivalent to a real signature is asking for trouble. People have convinced CAs to sign certificates that identify them as Bill Gates, and those certificates could be used to generate fraudulent transactions if we moved to such a system. We really should not be reducing the amount of face to face time people spend on finances -- we already reduced it too much.
To put it another way, how many people get away with cheating on their taxes each year? How many times has the USPTO granted a patent on something that was obviously a joke? Do you really want the post office acting as a CA?
It is not just the ads that are being displayed to you. It is the ads they display to you, your friends, your family, people who view your profile frequently, etc.
Facebook does have real property: servers, networks, offices, etc. Their business model is virtual though, in the sense that they do not actually produce anything tangible; they just trick people into giving away information to marketers.
I was just quoting the article. Personally, when I talk about these sorts of systems, I use the term "restriction technologies," because that is exactly what the systems are.
either way this is not DRM per say but rather a HD video optimized encryption/decryption device.. (best i can tell) so it wouldn't be anymore DRM than TLS/SSL
Perhaps the best term to describe it would be "hardware assisted DRM." TLS is only intended to prevent your adversary from reading your messages in transit; this goes a bit further, in that it is supposed to prevent the receiving party from forwarding the message to your adversary after decrypting it. If this were just a crypto accelerator, they would not be spending so much time talking about how this will "enable" HD movies on your PC; they would be talking about how it improves your security and whatnot, and they would be advertising it for their server processors.
Slashdot Mirror
When you get down to it, Facebook doesn't actually do something people need -- it is fun, people like it, but people had friends and social networks before Facebook, MySpace, BBSes, etc. People talk about how Facebook puts them in touch with lost friends; my experience has been that people are "in touch" only to the extent of clicking adding the person to their friends list, and then never speaking to them again. Farmville is not really a killer app, it is just an amusement. Facebook could vanish suddenly tomorrow, and I doubt that society would be seriously affected by its absence.
The idea, as I understand it, is that the handgun is a last resort -- when the grizzly is already biting down on your leg, you can shoot it in the head at point blank range, no marksmanship required.
That is a piece of metal, flung at speeds of around 350 m/s (1200 feet/second) with the only design specification of penetrating a human, flattening (or tumbling) and ripping through internal organs.
*ahem* guns are also good for killing wild animals. Please do not perpetuate the rhetoric about guns only being useful for killing people. I have met quite a few farmers who use small caliber rifles (.22lr, .22wmr, .223, .22-250, .204, etc.) for pest control, and plenty of people who hunt with firearms of various calibers -- .22lr all the way up to .30-06 (depending on what they are hunting, of course). I have met people who have hunted using handguns, and people who carry handguns for protection when they are camping in grizzly bear territory (yes, bear attacks are rare, but when you have a grizzly biting down on your leg, you will want something to repel or kill it, and a handgun is a pretty good way to do that).
A poster further up (not you, I realize) basically says it's irresponsible to not luck up your gun in a safe, lest it be stolen). You're saying that a home invasion is a good reason to have a gun. But what good is a gun in a safe going to do in a home invasion?
That was my post that you are referring to, and it is worth noting that not everyone shares the view that it is irresponsible to not lock up your guns. Personally, I side with the statistics: more often than not, people are shot with their own guns, which were left unlocked, during home invasions. Some people like to sleep with a gun next to their bed (or even under their pillow); I am not one of them. In fact, when it comes to guns, I only own rifles; my guns are used only for hunting and practicing at a shooting range.
Frankly, if I had to choose a weapon for home defense, a handgun would not be my first choice. I would much rather have a weapon that requires less accurate aim to be effective; a shotgun, for example. The tactical advantages presented by handguns -- portability, concealment, etc. -- are not particularly important for home defense, and handguns are targets for theft (criminals love them precisely because of their tactical advantages). Like I said, though, not everyone agrees with me, and if you look through the comments in this thread, you will see a lot of people who think that owning a handgun is a good idea.
I seriously have to question the people who go out hunting animals when there's a perfectly good grocery store down the block.
Where I live, the idiots who populated the area 100+ years ago thought that killing all the wolves and mountain lions would be a good idea. Now, the only predator deer have to contend with is the one with a rifle. If it weren't for hunters, we would be overrun -- there are more deer here now than when the Europeans first arrived. It is unfortunate, but that is the state of affairs.
Even if that were not the case, and even if you do not like the argument that meat eaters should do their own killing, there is the simple fact that some meats are just not available in supermarkets. I have only seen venison in jerky-form at the supermarket, it is fairly hard to find duck meat, and I have never seen rabbit or dove being sold in supermarkets. Some people like variety; what is wrong with that?
Actually, yes, some people do use handguns for hunting. It is also not uncommon for people to bring a handgun with them when they go camping in grizzly bear territory, for protection.
First of all, there are people who hunt with handguns, as well as people who carry a handgun while they are out camping to protect themselves from bears. People also hunt using semiautomatic rifles (not as commonly as bolt or level actions, but some people prefer semiauto, and it is fairly common for a .22 caliber). Second, where exactly do you propose hunting rifles and ammunition be stored? Designated shacks in the woods? People need to be allowed to keep their own equipment in their homes; for some people, that might be very far from the nearest hunting grounds (yes, city dwellers go hunting too, and they might not be comfortable leaving their rifles unattended in a cabin for months at a time during the off-season).
Yes, it is true, handguns can be concealed more easily than long guns can, which is why criminals prefer handguns, and why more crimes are committed using handguns than long guns. The answer not an outright ban on all guns, or even an outright ban on handguns. Really, shootings are a symptom of a much broader problem in society, and addressing the symptom will only have marginal benefits. I would say that a much bigger problem than the availability of guns is that fact that in some communities, one out of every three men are incarcerated -- fathers, brothers, husbands, uncles. Take away the guns, and those communities will still have problems, and the criminals will resort to other weapons (knives, bats, etc.; right now, I hear about more muggings at knife point than at gun point, and I live in a fairly gun-friendly state).
If that guy didn't have a gun, he could've used, what, a knife, a crossbow, a car?
How about a truck filled with explosives, like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_city_bombing
Interestingly, McVeigh's original plan was targeted shooting with a rifle, rather than mass killing.
As opposed to a close-range shot?
Stabbing someone to death is not a silent crime; people usually scream, loudly, when they are stabbed. Stabbing also tends to result in the murderer being covered in the victim's blood (shooting may also have this effect, but not to the same extent).
Well that's the thing -- gun control has nothing at all to do with these sorts of planned assassinations. Do you think that handguns being illegal would have stopped this guy from obtaining one to carry out his attack? When it comes to gun control, the question is really about common criminals being able to obtain guns, not about people who are planning out their crimes.
It's the first killing weapon where you don't have to be within physical contact of your victim to kill them,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_and_arrow
and it's accurate
Yeah, if you happen to be within a couple feet of your target. Beyond 10 feet, things start to change; you need more time to line up the shot, and believe me, the further away the target is, the harder it is to do that, especially with a handgun (the preferred firearm for criminals). This might be part of the reason why most shootings occur at close range (at least shootings that involve police officers):
http://www.handgunsmag.com/tactics_training/what_happens_gunfight/index1.html
Perhaps to avoid political fallout. You know, it doesn't look very good when you draw crosshairs labeled with a shooting victim's name, right over their location on a map. I am just going to guess that the website will be back online, minus one name, once the news stops reporting this story.
It would not, however, be difficult to stab them, beat them with a blunt object, hit them with a car, poison them, set their house on fire, or even just go extra-savage and punch and kick them to death. It is true, guns make killing a whole lot easier (at least in terms of the mechanics of it), but America is not the only developed nation where a large fraction of the population has guns, yet we seem to have a much (by orders of magnitude) higher murder rate. There is more to the story than just the availability of guns and ammunition.
Part of gun safety is storing guns in a manner that makes it difficult for people to steal them or for children to use them without adult supervision. A lot of guns used by criminals are stolen from law-abiding citizens' homes, who were not using a gun safe; a lot of school shootings involve guns that children take from their parents, which were not kept locked.
Their only reason is to kill people. Just ban guns already.
Hm...lack of alarms...leading to a catastrophic engineering failure...where have I heard this story before...
The problem is that fraudsters would not actually have to show their face or leave any physical traces of themselves anywhere if the system were all-digital. Someone could just sit back, send out a digital signature on a message that says, "Transfer $100k to this account," and walk away with the money -- no fingerprints, no need to show their face at a bank or post office, nothing. They could do it from another country if they wanted.
Digital signing would be a lot better if you had to carry a signing device (say, a card) into a bank to open your account, and part of that process was establishing a key that should be used for signing. Presumably, your computer would have an input device that could communicate with the token, to enable online banking and whatnot.
The problem with digital signing is that people need to be a lot more knowledgeable about it in order for it to be effective and reliable. Anyone can sign their name, and anyone can get a signature notarized. Yet only a small fraction of the population has the slightest clue about verifying public keys, and the CA system does little to mitigate this (mainly because the CAs are not as thorough as they should be when it comes to checking the certificates they sign). IMHO, the only real way to see a real benefit from a system that uses digital signing would be to require public keys to be registered with the bank in person, not online, and not using a CA. Why establish a system that makes it easier to commit fraud anonymously and remotely?
Public key crypto is great, but claiming that a digital signature is equivalent to a real signature is asking for trouble. People have convinced CAs to sign certificates that identify them as Bill Gates, and those certificates could be used to generate fraudulent transactions if we moved to such a system. We really should not be reducing the amount of face to face time people spend on finances -- we already reduced it too much.
To put it another way, how many people get away with cheating on their taxes each year? How many times has the USPTO granted a patent on something that was obviously a joke? Do you really want the post office acting as a CA?
Wouldn't the Wikileaks people be encrypting their messages?
It is not just the ads that are being displayed to you. It is the ads they display to you, your friends, your family, people who view your profile frequently, etc.
Facebook does have real property: servers, networks, offices, etc. Their business model is virtual though, in the sense that they do not actually produce anything tangible; they just trick people into giving away information to marketers.
They know that. You aren't smarter then they are, you don't know anything they don't in this regard.
Well, that leaves me wondering why DVDs are still being shipped with CSS...
I was just quoting the article. Personally, when I talk about these sorts of systems, I use the term "restriction technologies," because that is exactly what the systems are.
either way this is not DRM per say but rather a HD video optimized encryption/decryption device.. (best i can tell) so it wouldn't be anymore DRM than TLS/SSL
Perhaps the best term to describe it would be "hardware assisted DRM." TLS is only intended to prevent your adversary from reading your messages in transit; this goes a bit further, in that it is supposed to prevent the receiving party from forwarding the message to your adversary after decrypting it. If this were just a crypto accelerator, they would not be spending so much time talking about how this will "enable" HD movies on your PC; they would be talking about how it improves your security and whatnot, and they would be advertising it for their server processors.