Certainly the electorate needs to get off their collective asses and change things, but at present there is no effective mechanism for them to do so. The election system has been gamed to the point that it's virtually impossible to wrest control from the two-faced party currently in control, short of a major grass-roots campaign to toss the bastards out, and such campaigns inevitably need leaders and organization to give them focus, which the NSA is quite likely doing their best to disrupt (we have documented evidence that the intelligence organizations have been infiltrating and undermining potentially powerful citizen groups since at least the McCarthy era, do you really think anything has changed?)
America is an Oligarchy interview with the paper's Author. Another analysis which I would recommend skimming over.
What is most incredible to me is that the data under scrutiny in the study was from 1981-2002. One can only imagine how much worse things have gotten since the 2008 financial crisis. The study found that even when 80% of the population favored a particular public policy change, it was only instituted 43% of the time . We saw this first hand with the bankster bailout in 2008, when Americans across the board were opposed to it, but Congress passed TARP anyway (although they had to vote twice).
Unless you get the "elites" involved you're doomed.
The study found that even when 80% of the population favored a particular public policy change, it was only instituted 43% of the time.
Snowden, addressing the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, said he did not believe the NSA was engaged in 'nightmare scenarios,' such as the active compilation of a list of homosexuals 'to round them up and send them into camps.
They're not camps, they're called festivals.
But he did say that the infrastructure allowing this to happen had been built
By IBM!
Anyone have recommendations for learning math starting from, say, Algebra I or II level (high school) that will actually teach in a way that will be useful rather than taking a test?
Mathematics for the Non-mathematician by M. Kline. This book begins with reason and progresses through history beginning with the origins of math. I found this very insightful. If you get stuck consider Khan Academy for some different approaches.
Instead, openly gay characters are rare to the point of nonexistent in games.
One important part of successfully marketing something is broad appeal. Playing a gay protagonist evidently isn't something that appeals to the vast majority of game enthusiasts. Same for movies. If you were an enterprising individual perhaps you can see a lucrative niche?
The intent was to be shocking, and the casting very much reflected the societal assumption that white is good, dark is bad, and the violated expectation was part and parcel of the affect the movie wanted to have. That movie was released in 2005. Thirty years after the American civil rights movement, Hollywood still taps in to that cultural expectation, despite a generation of heavy political correctness in a much more visible medium than games.
Here's some references which predate the civil rights movement by about a thousand years. How shadow and light are referenced throughout history, having JACK ALL to do with some one's fucking skin. Black has a variety of meanings throughout history and especially to various cultures. Here's another one, the Yin and Yang, notice the colors?
These people and others like them are making the proposition that games should become part of the engine of social engineering that has made such a ham-fisted mess of television and movies, particularly for children.
Think of the children is effective at controlling people, why would there be any exception in today's political climate?
They think that games are for kids, and should therefore be used to condition children the same way they try to use TV. It would be unfortunate if that were to happen.
Do they ignore that the average age of gamers is 30s?
If games are to have any hope of being recognized as art, they have to be culturally relevant, and not be used as a bludgeon against culture.
Implying they're not works of art already is hilarious. Not every movie, just like games or that chunk of "pottery" made for mom, is a work of art either, but this is where taste comes in. Taste is highly subjective.
I am not defending AT&T. I think they should be heavily fined and hopefully someone go to jail. I also think that someone who exploited the hole should also be sent to jail and heavily fined. The only people I am defending are the ones who had their information stolen.
Jail I believe should be for violent offenders exclusively, jail time for accessing something, even millions of times is ridiculous. If he obtained protected information (cardholder data, SSNs) maybe, but if it isn't "protected" (say an email, first and last name, type of phone etc.) or doesn't come with any terms, it's fair game and the blame for the boring disclosure resides solely with the company since each request was authenticated by them. We have far too many people in Jail as it is. We're the world leader's in incarcerations and it's a dirty ass privatized business which I don't want to support when we can put these people to work, and fines do a wonderful job along with some community service. If that's the case Google needs to go to jail for indexing, and bing too since bing fed itself off of google. There was no exploit, this was the system operating as intended, supply it with an IMEI and get info. You want someone in jail for randomly trying publicly accessible page, incrementally, much like what google does with google maps mapping vehicles. Why isn't this illegal, it's occurring on public roads, too!? They make copies of the data accessible at these locations, or to use your words, they "steal the information" (addresses are personally identifiable information, but also public).
There are some authentications that do not use user/password. For example, Paypal Payflow uses a signature which is a single long number that identifies that account and gives authorization for access. It is a single number somewhat like an IMEI.
Authentication is a fuzzy thing, quick google returned: Authentication is the act of confirming the truth of an attribute of a datum or entity. By entering the IMEI this satiated the authentication, pretty shitty authentication. "Yup, address is good!". In regards to the paypal thing, btw paypal isn't a bank in the majority of the countries they do business in. In order to obtain this signature you need to create an account though, which requires a few pieces of information something an IMEI doesn't require. The signature seems like a token and is part of an authentication scheme, not simply a (terrible) username. The first 8 digits of the IMEI are assigned to manufacturers and made public (pretty good for something "private"!), and Apple, for instance, tends to do 'batch' naming for the rest, so if you have one iPhone IMEI you can guess all the others from that batch just by incrementing. That's a terrible authentication idea there, lou.
That is one URL and not millions of different URLs.
So if each person (in a large pool of say 250k) accesses one URL, with an IMEI that was generated, it's cool? Rape is cool the first time around then too, eh? This conflicts with below
Yes, if the IMEI does not belong to you or you have not been authorized by the owner to use it.
Why would I need permission since they can be derived? It's not something that's secret, or is protected, or has any expectation of privacy, it's even broadcast (to the carrier). Otherwise sites like this http://www.imei.info/ wouldn't exist. Think they burn all of those "passwords"?
Don't you see how this is very different from trying millions of different password combinations? One of the precepts of law is intent. It is pretty easy to show no intent when typing in a few incorrect characters. It is easy to show intents when you create a script that generates millions of possible IMEIs and spams a server with them.
I asked this specifically to nail down what an IMEI number is. An IMEI is not a password or a username any more than using a credit card number or social security number is. Unlike SSNs or CC#s it's an identifier for a device which doesn't even identify an owner in many cases (see prepays). These are similar to VINs on cars. How is it illegal to generate and try different combinations of this series of numbers, especially since portions of these numbers are public knowledge, on a website that is/was publicly accessible without any terms of use or limitations imposed by the operators for any clients which request info using a valid IMEI?
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
