Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:The right to be presumed innocent? (Score 1) 91

No. Presumption of guilt would be to lock you up, then later determine if you actually were drunk or not.

Presumption of guilt would be 'you have been accused of drunk driving, unless you can prove otherwise you are hereby convicted'.

In Australia, if you get charged with DUI, the police have to have evidence. This can be in the form of a breathalyser reading or blood test but not in the form of "I smelled beer on his breath".

Once you're charged you have two options, the first is to contest it and take it to court. The second is to pay the fine which is considered an admission of guilt. Because the requirement for evidence for Australian Police is high, most opt not to go to court. High range DUI (over 0.08 BAC) has an automatic court appearance, most just plead guilty.

Even though we have random breath tests, you still go through the same legal system with the same chances to demonstrate your innocence. Convictions are not automatic.

Comment Sigh, so many people dont understand the law. (Score 2) 91

The police can set up a road-block and demand that drivers provide a breath test and proof of their license at any time

Driving is a privilege, not a right. Abuse this privilege and it will be taken away from you.

If you dont like RBT's you have the choice not to drive. A lot of Australians like RBT's because it cuts down on drunk drivers. Whilst we're on that subject, you have no right to drink and drive.

The taxman can deliver an assessment that says you owe $xxxxx in taxes and you are presumed to be guilty unless you can prove you don't owe that much in tax.

That assessment is court admissible evidence that you do owe $xxxx in taxes. You have been demonstrated to be in arrears. The tax tables are published before the FY starts and the government it not permitted to change the tax tables once the FY begins. So you have no excuse for not knowing how much you owe. Of course as part of our legal system you get the opportunity to demonstrate those figures are wrong. This means you get the presumption of innocence as you get to challenge the assessment. The fact is most people choose not to because the assessment is accurate. You have no idea what presumption of innocence means.

As Midnight Oil so wisely said

What does Peter Garrett do? You strike me as one of those Freemen On The Land nutters. For the Americans playing along at home FOTL's are the equivalent of Tea Partiers, Libertarians and Rednecks all rolled into one completely retarded package.

Comment Re:Dear Australia (Score 1) 91

Hate to break it to you, but the US is way ahead of Australia in that regard.

If you ever get pulled over by a cop while carrying a large amount of cash on you, you'll find out the hard way.

Also we can record our cops.

For every traffic stop, my dash cam records audio. Plus because they use things like breathalisers, I cant be pulled out of my car because the officer "smelled beer on my breath", there is a standard of evidence to be upheld.

Not that I've ever had trouble with the cops. I get pulled over into an RBT (Random Breath Test) site about once a year and pull out a minute or two later with a "thanks for your co-operation sir". This is in my boy-racer Nissan Silvia S15 with fart canon exhaust, it really pays not to be a self-important wanker when dealing with cops.

Comment Resellers (Score 2, Insightful) 160

It's not about revenue, it's about shady resellers. Steam was cheerfully ignoring your Russian buddy gifting you games for ages until a few high profile cases of shady resellers selling bad keys. As has been pointed out in the rest of this thread you can still buy a game in Russia and play it in the US. You just can't gift them anymore. Steam is killing of the key resellers so that ppl knew to Steam and computers don't get ripped off by them.

Comment Re:This synopsis (Score 1) 130

It's like expecting Google search to suddenly gain sentience

Meet Watson, it beat the best humans in the open ended problem domain of "game show trivia" using natural language processing. When it won the Jeopardy championship it had 20 tons of air-conditioning and a room full of servers. Today it runs on a "pizza box" server and you can try it out yourself. After Jeopardy it went back to working with various medical institutes where it was trained and fed on a steady diet of medical journals, it's now well past the point where it became knowledgeable enough to pass the test for a US GP's license.

True Watson is blind, but I suspect the problems with visual input is more about the human teacher's failure to provide the right context and experience than it is about the artificial students ability to learn.

Comment Re:503 (Score 1) 396

I don't think I've entered either of those things in the last 10 years. Heck they aren't even shown on my URL at the moment.

Being not trustworthy and not necessarily secure from everyone is still a damn site more secure than shouting in a crowded theater.
Then you can consider repeat presentation of the same credentials. Going to the same self-signed website twice and being presented with the same certificate is at least an indication I was talking to the same person as before.
Then you can consider notoriety. If I see the same credentials right now as someone in Germany and someone in China, I can at least be partially sure that my end of the system hasn't been compromised.

Security is not black and white, regardless of how many people treat it as such. Do you also consider having a front door with a door lock any better than just having a hole in the wall open to the road? Or do you suggest we all stick with a simple hole in the wall until we can be bothered to install automated defense turrets outside of a metal dome that we put over our homes?

Comment Re:Bad for small business owners (Score 1) 396

The IP tells you very little these days. Even right now we are talking to a server with the same IP address. None the less every time we visit the page we will see something different and say something different. Even if the hosted content is the same what you see and what I see are likely still different due to personalized settings.

Much of the internet is like that. URLs are not named www.thediffinitiveguidetobombmaking.com/howtokillthepresident.html It's more likely to be somethingillegible.blogspot.com/randomnumbers/morenumbers/gibberish=?morerandomcrap. Even then using TLS the only thing that is visible is the initial connection to blogspot.

As for renewals, I don't remember any renewals. People remind me. My DNS host sends me an email when it's about to expire, my domain provider does the same, and I'm willing to bet you a Marsbar that an SSL cert provider who likes getting paid will also send you reminders. I do the self-signed thing which is also dead easy to remember since I last signed it on the 1st of July and thus lines up nicely with end of financial year reporting. Being able to remember to do something is a poor excuse. Being too difficult or too expensive however is quite legitimate.

Comment Re:Bad for small business owners (Score 1) 396

You're assuming https used to serve up static data.

Much of the web is no longer static data. Kind of like Slashdot. Next time I visit here I will get something different. You as WaffleMonster will likely see something different to me as thegarbz right now because of how the system is setup.

My fertilizer page may be 14673 bytes long. But does your fancy ability to type in the same URL tell you if I had 1 bag or 100 bags in my shopping cart when I checked out?

It may seem insignificant, it may be perfectly innocent, but none the less enough to get you put on a three-letter-agency watch list.

Comment Re:Meaningless (Score 2) 173

"NAS with 1 to 5 disks" is not an environmental spec.

The number of discs does not relate to the vibration or heat or any other factors. Those can only be measured directly. Now if WD specified that drives should not be placed in an environment where they will be subjected to x um vibration measured to some ISO standard then I would be right there with you.

How do 1-5 disks compare to a computer with 5 poorly balanced fans?
How do 1-5 disks compare to a single metal enclosure direct mounted, vs disks mounted via rubber grommets?
finally:
How do 1-5 disks placed horizontally next to each other or double stacked compared to drives mounted vertically and held in place with an anti-vibration sleeve such as the one used by Backblaze which they posted gave them a measurable performance improvement?

Even some braindead lawyer could point out the difference between a direct measurable specification and the completely subjective "NAS with 1-5 disks"
And as a side note Backblaze see no reliability differences between their consumer and enterprise grade drives, of which they have several thousand.

Comment Re:Ugh, WordPress (Score 1) 31

I recently moved from hand-written HTML for my personal site to Jekyll, which is the engine that powers GitHub pages. It does exactly what I want from a CMS:
  • Cleanly separate content and presentation.
  • Provide easy-to-edit templates.
  • Allows all of the content to be stored in a VCS.
  • Generates entirely static content, so none of its code is in the TCB for the site.

The one thing that it doesn't provide is a comment system, but I'd be quite happy for that to be provided by a separate package if I need one. In particular, it means that even if the comment system is hacked, it won't have access to the source for the site so it's easy to restore.

Slashdot Top Deals

The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood

Working...