Here it is, expanded. In a sane world a mother with three children, boarding an aircraft, would quickly calculate that there are 50,000 flights [I didn't check, this is an example] in the USA every day, and there was only one major incident almost 10 years ago, and assuming that each flight is equally likely to be blown up (or otherwise attacked) the risk is smaller than just crossing the road in front of their house. That's what a clinically sane person (or a robot) would think. And as result of this observation the risks associated with the flight would be ignored.
In the real world, though, the same mother is utterly terrorized by an idea that some foreigner can, possibly, maybe, harm her children. It doesn't matter if ten best statisticians in the world try to demonstrate that her fears are misdirected. Her children are much more likely to die in a car accident a week or two after they get their license. That won't make a dent in her attitude. Every danger must be taken care of, every single one. [The "think of the children!" argument is so popular because it works. Here it is just a convenient example.]
In other words, real people are not rational beings. They are driven by fears and confusion that are created by both camps (terrorists and the government.) People are emotional beings, and there are many ways known to many rulers of past, present and future how to create and maintain the necessary feelings. Any mathematical analysis of the society must take this into account.
It is true that the consequences are severe, but the consequences of Alice blowing you up are equally severe and you don't advocate watching her.
The argument that only Akhmed is to be watched is valid only if you have a limited number of watchers. In a mature police state (see "1984") everyone is watched, all the time. That's what CCTV cameras do. Dictators are amazingly color-blind; they will kill black and white equally easily. Another aspect of watching only Akhmed is that the motivation to watch is strongest toward him, due to history of attacks (an objective factor) and due to fears and prejudice of passengers (a subjective factor.)
Because the risk is tiny, yet the risk of Akhmed is tiny as well
That doesn't matter because (assuming example ratio that I used earlier) for any arbitrarily small 'e' it is true that (1 * e) < (9 * e). In other words, if ten flights are blown up Akhmed is guilty in 9 cases, and Alice in one. If you have to pick one you must watch Akhmed. This remains true regardless of how often airplanes are attacked - one per week or one per century.
Also, terrorists are everywhere. You should watch everyone around you all the time - after all, the consequences are severe, so why take the chance.
That's actually what the government wants us to do. But people don't really subscribe to this theory because most of terrorism was occurring in the skies. Maybe after the Times Square plot this will change. And one can't really fault the guy who noticed the smoke and reported it. Who knows if the smoldering detonator would have ignited something else in the car? If the whole car catches on fire - which is not that impossible - then those gas cylinders and fuel would certainly blow up.
If this is truly your mindset then I can understand that you want to watch Akhmed
I personally have no fear of flights for any reason, and having studied math some years ago I still have enough sanity left to ignore this danger. It is pointless to worry about things that you can't control in any case, and watching Akhmed is probably not going to make much of a difference. In both cases of explosives concealed in clothing passengers intervened only after the charge failed; their intervention was technically pointless. If the charges went boom then there would be no time for anyone to react, since they'd be all falling toward the ground by then.
No need to correct you, this is exactly what I was saying. If you are into receiver theory, the ideal filter for your signal matches the shape of your signal. Or, crudely rephrased, if P(a)=0.1 and P(b)=0.9 then you allocate 10% of your resources to look for 'a' and 90% to look for 'b'. It only makes sense; in case of the ideal receiver it is also mathematically proven.
The number of terrorists in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of all people, so the risk that Akhmed is bad is likewise tiny
That is true, and in a sane world we shouldn't care. However this is not a sane world. Besides, there are two factors that eat into your argument:
The risk is small, but the consequences are severe. This is why nuclear plants have containment domes, and that's why the Shuttle has three independent computers.
Passengers have nothing else to do, so their investment of time into watching for suspicious activity is not a loss.
In your analogy, it's like knowing that there is a one in a million chance that you will find your car keys under the bushes in someone's back yard, and if they aren't there they are forever lost. Are you going to nose around the backyard of some stranger because of that information?
Sure I would, if it is a life or death situation. Let me rephrase your own scenario:
"You are locked in a very large prison, for life. The warden tells you that he lost a key somewhere. You can walk anywhere within the prison. If you find that key you are free to walk out. Will you look for that key, as opposed to sitting on the bed in your unlocked cell until you die from old age?"
This is just another illustration of the principle that low odds alone are not a good reason to abandon some attempt. I probably won't look for a candy instead of a key - the gain is not worth the pain. But when people's lives are at stake they are willing to do far more than to glance from time to time at other passengers.
Profiling can make sense, but if all you have to go on is that the guy is named Akhmed, I hope you will hold your distrust and vigilance until you have a lot more than that to go on.
Nobody advocates preemptive beatings yet (since W left the White House.) But Akhmed will likely notice that many people are looking at him. Sucks to be him, and this isn't what I'd like to have. But too many of his compatriots tried to attack innocents. The best way to stop profiling is to stop breaking the statistical pattern.
No, what they said is that the specific plaintiffs bringing those lawsuits didn't "have standing," meaning that they were not a directly aggrieved party to the complaint stated.
Your statement is identical to mine, unless you claim that those "specific plaintiffs" are not US citizens. Then I'd agree with you; foreigners have no right to question legitimacy of elected US officials.
However all US citizens are, IMO, a directly aggrieved party because President's decisions affect their life (and not in a small way, thanks to Obama's new healthcare.) Care to prove the opposite?
like all who went before him he presented his state-issued certificate.
Try to enter US with a bad photocopy of your US passport. If you read about the issue you probably know that the document that Obama released is not sufficient for determining his status of a natural-born citizen. Every child that was born in the USA should have another document that conclusively proves where and when they were born on US territory. Obama doesn't release that document, and this leads to suspicion among many that he (and the state of Hawaii) simply doesn't have it. Which would be bad for his job security.
Luckily for us both groups are mostly idiots. Like that "bomb" in Times Square. That was the biggest joke.
So far it's only luck that prevented major problems. The underpants bomber and the Times Square bomber were incompetent idiots, just as they had to be, in order to sign up for a [near-] suicide deal.
But far bigger luck is in fact that their handlers are also idiots. They don't have to be, though, and that will change in the future. Imagine what a smart terrorist leader can do, given a good supply of 72-virgins-seeking candidates? That leader would test everything, thrice, and every real attempt would be deadly.
We are fortunate that the rigid, antiquated structure of AQ is not welcoming new Napoleons. Koran is not a good source of military strategy, and most freethinkers are not likely to don a straitjacket of Islam. But sooner or later there will be a boy genius, born into Islam but with a military talent. If his talent is noticed, hold on to your seat.
Do you really think a system that lets any nutjob make demands of the president would be workable?
If that "nutjob" has a constitutional right to ask for it, nobody cares if it is or isn't workable - it's the duty of the President, not something that he may or may not entertain for some selected citizens. He is everyone's President, and he must listen to all US citizens, whether he likes it or not. It's part of his job description. If he doesn't accept that, the exit door is that way.
Obama has perceived problems with his legitimacy. The best way to resolve them is by releasing relevant documents. He'd stomp all birthers into dust with release of his long form birth certificate. But Obama chose another strategy - suppress the information and run out of the clock. This only fuels birthers' suspicions, who have every reason to think that Obama has no long form BC, and as such he wasn't born in Hawaii, and as such...
It can be easily shown that every rational person must be on birthers' side because they have logic and reason working for them. And every irrational, probably religious person would have to be on Obama's side - just because they "believe" him. When beliefs are involved, no proof is required.
If someone is trying to light something on fire or is running around with a gun in an airplane, that's when you know that action is needed no matter if it's Akhmed or Alice doing it.
That would make sense only if there is no correlation between Akhmed and the fire. But there is one. So if you wish you can look for your car keys all over the city, while I will look for them where I lost them. Political correctness kills.
Sometime the authorities can be stupid beyond belief. Do the think that there isn't any imagery of their precious system?
Likely not a single slashdotter believes that "the authorities" were protecting their precious railway or whatever. What they did protect, though, is their own little domain. Just like tiny barons of Middle Ages, they insist that *they* have the final say in anything that happens on this patch of land, even if that patch of land is only a few huts, or a railway station. "F[orget] the Constitution or whatever Bill of Rights that you might think you have; by entering here you are in OUR domain, and WE control you from now on. If WE want you arrested you WILL be arrested. OUR word is THE LAW." And the worst crime you can commit is not to attempt to blow something up. See the case of the Times Square bomber - he wasn't beaten up like Rodney King, or shot like Amadou Diallo. The truly worst crime is to "disrespect" them:
The court went on to argue that the use of force on a non-threatening and non-violent motorist was appropriate and reasonable. The appellate court ruled that the pregnant woman could pose a threat to three armed male police officers.
That's what happens when unqualified people are given power. Power corrupts. I know, it's hardly a revelation, but the society is apparently unwilling to consider that, since it keeps giving more and more power to bureaucrats who already proved that they aren't capable of wisely using the power that they already have.
More than once I come across a SciFi story where some future society is fully controlled by a computer, for the good of the society. This seems a more and more wise approach with every year, especially considering that the society gives power only to best liars. An honest person can't be ever elected to any office above the town drunk.
We do not have the numbers; we do not have the weapons; we do not have a place to stand a defend (and make no mistake, you will need such a concrete thing);
As US courts said several times, citizens of the USA don't even have a right [standing] to ask the President to prove, with papers in hand, that he is a qualified US citizen. In a democratic society one would think that *any* citizen would have standing to ask that, just as any shareholder, even with 1 share, can come to a meeting and ask questions.
As I said elsewhere, there is no way to change the current system until the said system crumbles on its own. They all do, eventually. Once the government loses power - and support - then it becomes possible for alternative centers of power to rise (states, cities, communities.) Currently the US government is going full speed ahead into hubris, waste and mismanagement, like a runaway chain reaction. Appeals to honesty and good intentions of such a government are not more practical than asking an exploding fusion bomb to reconsider. In both cases, "it's their nature" - they are on autopilot, and all the controls are smashed.
I hope they at least compensated for the capacitance of the human hand touching the antenna by using a varicap circuit to tune the antenna.
If you place the varactor diode at the low voltage, high current node then it won't do much. If you place it at the high voltage, low current node then the RF will be adding to the bias of the varactor, and then the circuit is not linear any more - which is bad news.
Also note how few projects there are that are above VHF in these books even though amateur bands go to 1.3 GHz.
That's news to me since I have a ham radio for 10 and 24 GHz, and those are not even highest frequency ham bands. There are allocated ham bands up to 250 GHz, and you don't need a license to operate above 400 GHz.
But on the subject of your comment - indeed, anyone who is designing a microwave antenna without CST or Ansoft tools is asking for trouble. At best it's endless rework; at worst you can't afford to change the design 100 times. Optimizers in CST are worth their weight in latinum.
just maybe, you (in the general sense) could have prevented this inane 3D tv/ movie/ game bullshit. Think of the grown men and women who could have been saved $1000s of dollars wasted on TVs, receivers and goofy glasses.
I hoped for a moment that the society is done with saving grown men from themselves. I guess I was wrong. This desire is eternal.
Did you know that if you experience this problem that you can achieve electrical isolation yourself without any offensive looking rubber bumper? A $1 bottle of clear nail varnish and you're all set.
Not at those frequencies. The coupling is capacitive, and the only thing you can do is increase the distance between the antenna and your hand. You need 1/4" or more of empty space. You don't even want rubber (see loss tangent). The best way to hold this phone is by levitating it with your Force.
Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.
I read it as "developers will need to start supporting the new touch API and stop presuming a certain fixed size of controls and stuff."
Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go?
It highly depends on the requirements. YouTube videos, for example, have ad overlays that are interactive. If you can do that in HTML5, over a playing <video> tag, they will use that. But note that the video stream must be DRM-protected, so nobody could just point wget at the target of the <video> tag and leech your precious home movie of a lolcat.
Reading in the sunlight is supposed to be a selling point, but I've never read paper books in direct sunlight.
I don't do it either. First of all, full sunlight is way too bright. Second, if you are outdoors then probably there are better things to do than reading a book, and there are distractions too. Reading is done best at home, alone, in a quiet setting. For most people it's an hour before falling asleep - because they don't have other time for that, and because they can expect to not be disturbed by phone calls, email, work, family, etc.
This is posted from Samsung Q1 UMPC (a tablet.) I use it to read books, read/. and listen to music (it has stereo BT; speakers are present, but their frequency range is lacking.) The backlight is set to minimum, and it works just fine in a dark room. I hate eInk for its low contrast and for its flickering.
how are they supposed to meet their handler without the US spy satelite picking that up?
Spy satellites are not magic. You meet someone in a building, or at night, or on a cloudy day. Satellites can't recognize people's faces anyway (and they don't see them either.)
How would they meet their handler without being seen by anybody anywhere?
It's not a requirement. A huge crowd offers very good privacy, see Karachi.
How would they go to a place like Pakistan and not set off red flags?
Through a 3rd country, perhaps? Those guys may have several passports, all legal, if they are citizens of several countries (or simply they might want to use fake or stolen passports.) Besides, a handler can easily travel from his base in Pakistan to a neutral country - like China or India - if necessary.
It would seem to be next to impossible for individuals to go to terrorist training camps and then come back and not trigger any sort of red flag.
Once you leave the US territory the USA has very little knowledge of where you are and what you are doing - unless you are so important that they assigned some spies to follow you.
LiveCDs on the other hand actually are secure but only if theres no backdoor anywhere in the Linux Kernel or in any software used. Do you trust the Linux Kernel programmers with your life? I doubt terrorists do
Hard to say. I trust Toyota with my life, for example. And note that terrorists are routinely risking their lives; their very occupation is a huge risk. It's probably far more dangerous for a terrorist to take a stroll in a park than to obtain a random copy of Linux and use it for random browsing. If someone is onto them to the extent that they do MITM on them and feed them a backdoored Linux CD (can't imagine how would they know!) then the terrorist's goose is already thoroughly cooked.
I don't think at this time the terrorists have that level of technical sophistication but that is something to look out for in the future.
Majority of "foot soldiers" are, and will be technically incompetent. However they will follow instructions that are written by a well educated terrorist. Why do we think AQ doesn't have its own IT? There are probably lots of AQ sympathizers who aren't fit to carry the rifle but are perfectly willing to give advices. It would be very unwise to assume that AQ is a bunch of idiots.
So if they send PGP encrypted data out the NSA would probably pick up on it instantly
Unlikely. "This here JPEG is completely corrupted, sorry about that." or "This here MPEG2 movie of my vacation is playing fine, however the last two bits of each pixel of each frame carry some other information..." With the sheer volume of messages sent over the Internet, it's not possible to analyze the content in real time in hope of finding something in it. Even an Excel spreadsheet, with one byte of a.pgp file in each cell,formatted as currency, will confuse the hell out of any traffic analyzer - even a human, if you make a token effort to colorize your "sales report for region of $foo". I'm sure it will sail through even if the terrorist doesn't bother PGPing his message and just formats the ASCII plaintext this way.
Does anyone know what special benefits Georgia offers beyond this abscence of tax?
Georgia went through a couple of civil wars (and a few presidents) since the USSR dissolved. Georgia initiated another war recently, and successfully lost territory this way. The president of Georgia is believed to be insane; some say that he personally killed one of his political opponents. He is currently the black sheep among presidents in the region. Russian officials won't tell him the time of the day. There are frequent demonstrations for and against the president. The country is poor (but that's pretty easy to conclude by now.) The local language is pretty unique. The country is split into several tribes who aren't particularly in love with each other (that's what caused the loss of territories in the recent war.) Many people live in mountain villages, with minimum communications. Georgia was best known in the USSR for its agricultural goods - wine, peaches and other stuff that requires warm climate. There are probably quite a few programmers in cities, though.
That sounds like a bunch of horseshit to me. Do you have any credible source?
He is correct. When I was much younger I visited relatives who lived outside of a city, and they kept chickens. Rarely a chicken, already separated from its head, wasn't struggling to run away. These days I hunt varmints (sage rats and similar non-game species,) and when they are hit with even a very small caliber (.17HMR is my favorite) they expire within seconds. Any varmint hunter will tell you the same, and they certainly know.
Everyone knows they were involved, but they each only share a small fraction of the responsibility, and alone none of their actions killed anyone. This gives them deniability, and allows their consciences to remain clean.
Most importantly is the fact that killing another being isn't 'ruling over' them
It is, because "ruling over someone" means determining his future to some extent. Killing someone is the ultimate setting of his fate.
you didn't define the manner in which differences could be 'resolved' nor a particular protocol for doing so
Please read the GP comment again. There are up to N lifeforms, each unique. If two of such lifeforms meet and need to resolve a conflict, there would be N^2 possible manners and protocols that they could settle on. Nobody has any authority to define anything and shove that decision down the lifeforms' throats. Two intellectuals might want to play chess; two kickboxers might want to beat each other for a while.
pretty much everything we eat constitutes some form of life-form
If a fruit tree or a cow are unhappy about their situation they are always free to discuss that with their owners. I'm sure if a cow presents a good case, the rancher will let it go, after the cow returns the money spent on raising of that cow up to this point. Wolves in the forest will be glad to learn about such a separation.
because cryptographic systems are worth nada without a web of trust. And right now, there is none [...]
There may be none for geeks; crypto enthusiasts like using the technology, but they don't really have any secrets worth securing, and so the WoT is kind of not very important. On the other hand, terrorists have secrets, and they *already* have their WoT - it is based not on digital certificates but on personal contacts. Terrorists, like every illegal and underground organization, need WoT not just to send messages; they need it to even meet and talk to each other. But when a terrorist needs to communicate over the Internet, he will personally travel to Pakistan (or wherever) to receive his keyring from his handler.
There is of course a possibility that a terrorist can be simply given a https:/// URL of some webmail in Asia, and given that browsers usually don't save encrypted pages (and the pr0n mode saves nothing at all) it's easy and convenient for a terrorist to have a medium security communication channel that leaves no plaintext on the user's computer. A live boot CD would offer security that is comparable to PKI, as long as no ciphertext needs to be retained. Considering the issue of the trusted computer, the boot CD and SSL might even do better than a locally ran crypto.
I've reason to believe Fox News is hosting something illegal, I should be able to submit a DMCA request to Google
It's not enough to "have reason to believe" - TFA lists several strict requirements for a takedown notification, and they all must be "substantially met." So if you wrote a book, and Fox put it on their server, then you can start writing the letter. Even then only the infringing material will be removed.
Google would then remove all links to foxnews.com?
Silencing an opponent's speech now? That's what Hugo Chavez is doing. You are in an interesting company:-)
Yep, which would require a concerted effort to gather the required data
And, as I suggested, the law forbids every individual element of such an effort simply because this way there is no need to prove that a concerted effort was ever attempted. In other words, it is illegal for you to give me a non-fatal dose of a poison (even though it won't kill me) because if you do it several times I will die. The law doesn't want to know if you did it several times or got scared after a first few doses. Each such attempt is a crime in itself, just because there is no lawful reason to covertly administer small, non-lethal doses of poison.
If that were true, I could go to jail every time windows picks up a new access point.
The SSID is public information (like a name plate on the door,) and as far as I know Windows doesn't capture anything else. Google captured and stored everything.
There is an easy way to encrypt your packets.
First, many people are not sufficiently geeky to even attempt that. I don't think we can deny them the safety and the privacy just because we, geeks, have the knowledge to break into their poorly configured networks and do whatever we want on their LANs. A door, locked or not, is not a sufficient protection against a burglar. However a closed door means "do not enter," and anyone who ignores this norm of the society is behaving antisocially.
Second, WiFi can use several encryption methods, and different devices on the network may support some subset of them. Not all supported encryption modes work well in all devices. For example, I recall having a router that liked to drop encrypted connections now and then. Sometimes a device is an embedded 802.11 module, with minimum interface. Sometimes it is an old PDA, or a new smartphone... In all cases the unencrypted connection is the lowest common denominator, and it is the one that has the best chance of working well. There is also performance penalty for encryption, that might be important if you stream video from cameras, for example. Also if there are guest devices, it is quite inconvenient to distribute key material to guests (and then worry about its security, or change the keys after guests leave.)
It is true that a hardcore privacy enthusiast should do everything in their power to hide, encrypt and otherwise make their communication invisible to others. But there are well understood reasons to not do so and still expect other people to be polite enough to not spy. Most people don't have steel sheets for curtains, though many common curtains can be seen through... people just expect that nobody would be peering into their windows at night. Curtains are a sign to "keep out", not a barrier.
Imagine that you had some inconvenient photos, and if those photos are "accessed" your political career will end. Someone stole the photos. But they called you to assure that those photos will be never accessed. Will that be as good as if you personally destroyed all media those photos were on?
If just the potential to access it is enough then we're all guilty because we all have the "potential" to access the open Wifi networks in the first place.
I can't imagine a sane situation where a potential to commit a crime is the same as the crime itself. However one guy was recently arrested (illegally) and his lawful property "held" for a crime that other people thought he might be considering committing in the future.
If I copy down 2 digits from your credit card number, I've "captured" your "personal data", but there's dick-all I can do with it.
It may well be that one day I paid with my c/c and you noted first two digits. Indeed nothing you can do with them. Next day I again paid with my c/c and you noted next two digits. Now it makes four. Next day... [repeat until the logical end.] This is how you can get my entire c/c record. Any single observation is useless; but when combined they are very much useful.
The law in question doesn't try to measure the harm of each individual intercept because that would also require consideration of cumulative harm. The society instead decided to prohibit all intercepts since they have hardly any social advantages to begin with. One could argue that the society should benefit from Google's WiFi-assisted mapping, but that "should" is very subjective. Some people want more privacy than the other, even if they are not competent enough to configure their WiFi better (or not to run it.)
A professional of privacy studies would lock and bar the door; a casual user of privacy would just hang a note "please do not enter" on an unlocked door. Unless you have a good reason to believe that some particular access point is public (free for anyone to connect) you should assume that the "do not enter" note is present, along with the SSID of the AP. Entering, or listening at the door is rude.
Likewise, if I copy down your full name and address from the phone book, I've "captured" a chunk of your "personal data" which may actually be useful, but did I do anything wrong?
It depends on how you use that data. This example is different from the c/c number because there is a value in publishing people's addresses and phone numbers (at least to Terminators; I don't know anyone else who uses phone books.) Besides, there is an easy way to have an unlisted phone number.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand this argument.
Here it is, expanded. In a sane world a mother with three children, boarding an aircraft, would quickly calculate that there are 50,000 flights [I didn't check, this is an example] in the USA every day, and there was only one major incident almost 10 years ago, and assuming that each flight is equally likely to be blown up (or otherwise attacked) the risk is smaller than just crossing the road in front of their house. That's what a clinically sane person (or a robot) would think. And as result of this observation the risks associated with the flight would be ignored.
In the real world, though, the same mother is utterly terrorized by an idea that some foreigner can, possibly, maybe, harm her children. It doesn't matter if ten best statisticians in the world try to demonstrate that her fears are misdirected. Her children are much more likely to die in a car accident a week or two after they get their license. That won't make a dent in her attitude. Every danger must be taken care of, every single one. [The "think of the children!" argument is so popular because it works. Here it is just a convenient example.]
In other words, real people are not rational beings. They are driven by fears and confusion that are created by both camps (terrorists and the government.) People are emotional beings, and there are many ways known to many rulers of past, present and future how to create and maintain the necessary feelings. Any mathematical analysis of the society must take this into account.
It is true that the consequences are severe, but the consequences of Alice blowing you up are equally severe and you don't advocate watching her.
The argument that only Akhmed is to be watched is valid only if you have a limited number of watchers. In a mature police state (see "1984") everyone is watched, all the time. That's what CCTV cameras do. Dictators are amazingly color-blind; they will kill black and white equally easily. Another aspect of watching only Akhmed is that the motivation to watch is strongest toward him, due to history of attacks (an objective factor) and due to fears and prejudice of passengers (a subjective factor.)
Because the risk is tiny, yet the risk of Akhmed is tiny as well
That doesn't matter because (assuming example ratio that I used earlier) for any arbitrarily small 'e' it is true that (1 * e) < (9 * e). In other words, if ten flights are blown up Akhmed is guilty in 9 cases, and Alice in one. If you have to pick one you must watch Akhmed. This remains true regardless of how often airplanes are attacked - one per week or one per century.
Also, terrorists are everywhere. You should watch everyone around you all the time - after all, the consequences are severe, so why take the chance.
That's actually what the government wants us to do. But people don't really subscribe to this theory because most of terrorism was occurring in the skies. Maybe after the Times Square plot this will change. And one can't really fault the guy who noticed the smoke and reported it. Who knows if the smoldering detonator would have ignited something else in the car? If the whole car catches on fire - which is not that impossible - then those gas cylinders and fuel would certainly blow up.
If this is truly your mindset then I can understand that you want to watch Akhmed
I personally have no fear of flights for any reason, and having studied math some years ago I still have enough sanity left to ignore this danger. It is pointless to worry about things that you can't control in any case, and watching Akhmed is probably not going to make much of a difference. In both cases of explosives concealed in clothing passengers intervened only after the charge failed; their intervention was technically pointless. If the charges went boom then there would be no time for anyone to react, since they'd be all falling toward the ground by then.
However when hundreds of people are lock
Correct me if that is wrong.
No need to correct you, this is exactly what I was saying. If you are into receiver theory, the ideal filter for your signal matches the shape of your signal. Or, crudely rephrased, if P(a)=0.1 and P(b)=0.9 then you allocate 10% of your resources to look for 'a' and 90% to look for 'b'. It only makes sense; in case of the ideal receiver it is also mathematically proven.
The number of terrorists in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of all people, so the risk that Akhmed is bad is likewise tiny
That is true, and in a sane world we shouldn't care. However this is not a sane world. Besides, there are two factors that eat into your argument:
In your analogy, it's like knowing that there is a one in a million chance that you will find your car keys under the bushes in someone's back yard, and if they aren't there they are forever lost. Are you going to nose around the backyard of some stranger because of that information?
Sure I would, if it is a life or death situation. Let me rephrase your own scenario:
"You are locked in a very large prison, for life. The warden tells you that he lost a key somewhere. You can walk anywhere within the prison. If you find that key you are free to walk out. Will you look for that key, as opposed to sitting on the bed in your unlocked cell until you die from old age?"
This is just another illustration of the principle that low odds alone are not a good reason to abandon some attempt. I probably won't look for a candy instead of a key - the gain is not worth the pain. But when people's lives are at stake they are willing to do far more than to glance from time to time at other passengers.
Profiling can make sense, but if all you have to go on is that the guy is named Akhmed, I hope you will hold your distrust and vigilance until you have a lot more than that to go on.
Nobody advocates preemptive beatings yet (since W left the White House.) But Akhmed will likely notice that many people are looking at him. Sucks to be him, and this isn't what I'd like to have. But too many of his compatriots tried to attack innocents. The best way to stop profiling is to stop breaking the statistical pattern.
No, what they said is that the specific plaintiffs bringing those lawsuits didn't "have standing," meaning that they were not a directly aggrieved party to the complaint stated.
Your statement is identical to mine, unless you claim that those "specific plaintiffs" are not US citizens. Then I'd agree with you; foreigners have no right to question legitimacy of elected US officials.
However all US citizens are, IMO, a directly aggrieved party because President's decisions affect their life (and not in a small way, thanks to Obama's new healthcare.) Care to prove the opposite?
like all who went before him he presented his state-issued certificate.
Try to enter US with a bad photocopy of your US passport. If you read about the issue you probably know that the document that Obama released is not sufficient for determining his status of a natural-born citizen. Every child that was born in the USA should have another document that conclusively proves where and when they were born on US territory. Obama doesn't release that document, and this leads to suspicion among many that he (and the state of Hawaii) simply doesn't have it. Which would be bad for his job security.
I'm not addressing your strawman, by the way.
Luckily for us both groups are mostly idiots. Like that "bomb" in Times Square. That was the biggest joke.
So far it's only luck that prevented major problems. The underpants bomber and the Times Square bomber were incompetent idiots, just as they had to be, in order to sign up for a [near-] suicide deal.
But far bigger luck is in fact that their handlers are also idiots. They don't have to be, though, and that will change in the future. Imagine what a smart terrorist leader can do, given a good supply of 72-virgins-seeking candidates? That leader would test everything, thrice, and every real attempt would be deadly.
We are fortunate that the rigid, antiquated structure of AQ is not welcoming new Napoleons. Koran is not a good source of military strategy, and most freethinkers are not likely to don a straitjacket of Islam. But sooner or later there will be a boy genius, born into Islam but with a military talent. If his talent is noticed, hold on to your seat.
Do you really think a system that lets any nutjob make demands of the president would be workable?
If that "nutjob" has a constitutional right to ask for it, nobody cares if it is or isn't workable - it's the duty of the President, not something that he may or may not entertain for some selected citizens. He is everyone's President, and he must listen to all US citizens, whether he likes it or not. It's part of his job description. If he doesn't accept that, the exit door is that way.
Obama has perceived problems with his legitimacy. The best way to resolve them is by releasing relevant documents. He'd stomp all birthers into dust with release of his long form birth certificate. But Obama chose another strategy - suppress the information and run out of the clock. This only fuels birthers' suspicions, who have every reason to think that Obama has no long form BC, and as such he wasn't born in Hawaii, and as such ...
It can be easily shown that every rational person must be on birthers' side because they have logic and reason working for them. And every irrational, probably religious person would have to be on Obama's side - just because they "believe" him. When beliefs are involved, no proof is required.
If someone is trying to light something on fire or is running around with a gun in an airplane, that's when you know that action is needed no matter if it's Akhmed or Alice doing it.
That would make sense only if there is no correlation between Akhmed and the fire. But there is one. So if you wish you can look for your car keys all over the city, while I will look for them where I lost them. Political correctness kills.
Sometime the authorities can be stupid beyond belief. Do the think that there isn't any imagery of their precious system?
Likely not a single slashdotter believes that "the authorities" were protecting their precious railway or whatever. What they did protect, though, is their own little domain. Just like tiny barons of Middle Ages, they insist that *they* have the final say in anything that happens on this patch of land, even if that patch of land is only a few huts, or a railway station. "F[orget] the Constitution or whatever Bill of Rights that you might think you have; by entering here you are in OUR domain, and WE control you from now on. If WE want you arrested you WILL be arrested. OUR word is THE LAW." And the worst crime you can commit is not to attempt to blow something up. See the case of the Times Square bomber - he wasn't beaten up like Rodney King, or shot like Amadou Diallo. The truly worst crime is to "disrespect" them:
That's what happens when unqualified people are given power. Power corrupts. I know, it's hardly a revelation, but the society is apparently unwilling to consider that, since it keeps giving more and more power to bureaucrats who already proved that they aren't capable of wisely using the power that they already have.
More than once I come across a SciFi story where some future society is fully controlled by a computer, for the good of the society. This seems a more and more wise approach with every year, especially considering that the society gives power only to best liars. An honest person can't be ever elected to any office above the town drunk.
We do not have the numbers; we do not have the weapons; we do not have a place to stand a defend (and make no mistake, you will need such a concrete thing);
As US courts said several times, citizens of the USA don't even have a right [standing] to ask the President to prove, with papers in hand, that he is a qualified US citizen. In a democratic society one would think that *any* citizen would have standing to ask that, just as any shareholder, even with 1 share, can come to a meeting and ask questions.
As I said elsewhere, there is no way to change the current system until the said system crumbles on its own. They all do, eventually. Once the government loses power - and support - then it becomes possible for alternative centers of power to rise (states, cities, communities.) Currently the US government is going full speed ahead into hubris, waste and mismanagement, like a runaway chain reaction. Appeals to honesty and good intentions of such a government are not more practical than asking an exploding fusion bomb to reconsider. In both cases, "it's their nature" - they are on autopilot, and all the controls are smashed.
Except that you only need two, the third point is the one you're trying to find. Unless you're doing it in 3D.
Or on a 2D surface of a sphere, for example...
I hope they at least compensated for the capacitance of the human hand touching the antenna by using a varicap circuit to tune the antenna.
If you place the varactor diode at the low voltage, high current node then it won't do much. If you place it at the high voltage, low current node then the RF will be adding to the bias of the varactor, and then the circuit is not linear any more - which is bad news.
Also note how few projects there are that are above VHF in these books even though amateur bands go to 1.3 GHz.
That's news to me since I have a ham radio for 10 and 24 GHz, and those are not even highest frequency ham bands. There are allocated ham bands up to 250 GHz, and you don't need a license to operate above 400 GHz.
But on the subject of your comment - indeed, anyone who is designing a microwave antenna without CST or Ansoft tools is asking for trouble. At best it's endless rework; at worst you can't afford to change the design 100 times. Optimizers in CST are worth their weight in latinum.
just maybe, you (in the general sense) could have prevented this inane 3D tv/ movie/ game bullshit. Think of the grown men and women who could have been saved $1000s of dollars wasted on TVs, receivers and goofy glasses.
I hoped for a moment that the society is done with saving grown men from themselves. I guess I was wrong. This desire is eternal.
Did you know that if you experience this problem that you can achieve electrical isolation yourself without any offensive looking rubber bumper? A $1 bottle of clear nail varnish and you're all set.
Not at those frequencies. The coupling is capacitive, and the only thing you can do is increase the distance between the antenna and your hand. You need 1/4" or more of empty space. You don't even want rubber (see loss tangent). The best way to hold this phone is by levitating it with your Force.
Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.
I read it as "developers will need to start supporting the new touch API and stop presuming a certain fixed size of controls and stuff."
Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go?
It highly depends on the requirements. YouTube videos, for example, have ad overlays that are interactive. If you can do that in HTML5, over a playing <video> tag, they will use that. But note that the video stream must be DRM-protected, so nobody could just point wget at the target of the <video> tag and leech your precious home movie of a lolcat.
Reading in the sunlight is supposed to be a selling point, but I've never read paper books in direct sunlight.
I don't do it either. First of all, full sunlight is way too bright. Second, if you are outdoors then probably there are better things to do than reading a book, and there are distractions too. Reading is done best at home, alone, in a quiet setting. For most people it's an hour before falling asleep - because they don't have other time for that, and because they can expect to not be disturbed by phone calls, email, work, family, etc.
This is posted from Samsung Q1 UMPC (a tablet.) I use it to read books, read /. and listen to music (it has stereo BT; speakers are present, but their frequency range is lacking.) The backlight is set to minimum, and it works just fine in a dark room. I hate eInk for its low contrast and for its flickering.
how are they supposed to meet their handler without the US spy satelite picking that up?
Spy satellites are not magic. You meet someone in a building, or at night, or on a cloudy day. Satellites can't recognize people's faces anyway (and they don't see them either.)
How would they meet their handler without being seen by anybody anywhere?
It's not a requirement. A huge crowd offers very good privacy, see Karachi.
How would they go to a place like Pakistan and not set off red flags?
Through a 3rd country, perhaps? Those guys may have several passports, all legal, if they are citizens of several countries (or simply they might want to use fake or stolen passports.) Besides, a handler can easily travel from his base in Pakistan to a neutral country - like China or India - if necessary.
It would seem to be next to impossible for individuals to go to terrorist training camps and then come back and not trigger any sort of red flag.
Once you leave the US territory the USA has very little knowledge of where you are and what you are doing - unless you are so important that they assigned some spies to follow you.
LiveCDs on the other hand actually are secure but only if theres no backdoor anywhere in the Linux Kernel or in any software used. Do you trust the Linux Kernel programmers with your life? I doubt terrorists do
Hard to say. I trust Toyota with my life, for example. And note that terrorists are routinely risking their lives; their very occupation is a huge risk. It's probably far more dangerous for a terrorist to take a stroll in a park than to obtain a random copy of Linux and use it for random browsing. If someone is onto them to the extent that they do MITM on them and feed them a backdoored Linux CD (can't imagine how would they know!) then the terrorist's goose is already thoroughly cooked.
I don't think at this time the terrorists have that level of technical sophistication but that is something to look out for in the future.
Majority of "foot soldiers" are, and will be technically incompetent. However they will follow instructions that are written by a well educated terrorist. Why do we think AQ doesn't have its own IT? There are probably lots of AQ sympathizers who aren't fit to carry the rifle but are perfectly willing to give advices. It would be very unwise to assume that AQ is a bunch of idiots.
So if they send PGP encrypted data out the NSA would probably pick up on it instantly
Unlikely. "This here JPEG is completely corrupted, sorry about that." or "This here MPEG2 movie of my vacation is playing fine, however the last two bits of each pixel of each frame carry some other information..." With the sheer volume of messages sent over the Internet, it's not possible to analyze the content in real time in hope of finding something in it. Even an Excel spreadsheet, with one byte of a .pgp file in each cell,formatted as currency, will confuse the hell out of any traffic analyzer - even a human, if you make a token effort to colorize your "sales report for region of $foo". I'm sure it will sail through even if the terrorist doesn't bother PGPing his message and just formats the ASCII plaintext this way.
Does anyone know what special benefits Georgia offers beyond this abscence of tax?
Georgia went through a couple of civil wars (and a few presidents) since the USSR dissolved. Georgia initiated another war recently, and successfully lost territory this way. The president of Georgia is believed to be insane; some say that he personally killed one of his political opponents. He is currently the black sheep among presidents in the region. Russian officials won't tell him the time of the day. There are frequent demonstrations for and against the president. The country is poor (but that's pretty easy to conclude by now.) The local language is pretty unique. The country is split into several tribes who aren't particularly in love with each other (that's what caused the loss of territories in the recent war.) Many people live in mountain villages, with minimum communications. Georgia was best known in the USSR for its agricultural goods - wine, peaches and other stuff that requires warm climate. There are probably quite a few programmers in cities, though.
That sounds like a bunch of horseshit to me. Do you have any credible source?
He is correct. When I was much younger I visited relatives who lived outside of a city, and they kept chickens. Rarely a chicken, already separated from its head, wasn't struggling to run away. These days I hunt varmints (sage rats and similar non-game species,) and when they are hit with even a very small caliber (.17HMR is my favorite) they expire within seconds. Any varmint hunter will tell you the same, and they certainly know.
Everyone knows they were involved, but they each only share a small fraction of the responsibility, and alone none of their actions killed anyone. This gives them deniability, and allows their consciences to remain clean.
And that's how Rikaine Delmarre was killed.
Most importantly is the fact that killing another being isn't 'ruling over' them
It is, because "ruling over someone" means determining his future to some extent. Killing someone is the ultimate setting of his fate.
you didn't define the manner in which differences could be 'resolved' nor a particular protocol for doing so
Please read the GP comment again. There are up to N lifeforms, each unique. If two of such lifeforms meet and need to resolve a conflict, there would be N^2 possible manners and protocols that they could settle on. Nobody has any authority to define anything and shove that decision down the lifeforms' throats. Two intellectuals might want to play chess; two kickboxers might want to beat each other for a while.
pretty much everything we eat constitutes some form of life-form
If a fruit tree or a cow are unhappy about their situation they are always free to discuss that with their owners. I'm sure if a cow presents a good case, the rancher will let it go, after the cow returns the money spent on raising of that cow up to this point. Wolves in the forest will be glad to learn about such a separation.
because cryptographic systems are worth nada without a web of trust. And right now, there is none [...]
There may be none for geeks; crypto enthusiasts like using the technology, but they don't really have any secrets worth securing, and so the WoT is kind of not very important. On the other hand, terrorists have secrets, and they *already* have their WoT - it is based not on digital certificates but on personal contacts. Terrorists, like every illegal and underground organization, need WoT not just to send messages; they need it to even meet and talk to each other. But when a terrorist needs to communicate over the Internet, he will personally travel to Pakistan (or wherever) to receive his keyring from his handler.
There is of course a possibility that a terrorist can be simply given a https:/// URL of some webmail in Asia, and given that browsers usually don't save encrypted pages (and the pr0n mode saves nothing at all) it's easy and convenient for a terrorist to have a medium security communication channel that leaves no plaintext on the user's computer. A live boot CD would offer security that is comparable to PKI, as long as no ciphertext needs to be retained. Considering the issue of the trusted computer, the boot CD and SSL might even do better than a locally ran crypto.
I've reason to believe Fox News is hosting something illegal, I should be able to submit a DMCA request to Google
It's not enough to "have reason to believe" - TFA lists several strict requirements for a takedown notification, and they all must be "substantially met." So if you wrote a book, and Fox put it on their server, then you can start writing the letter. Even then only the infringing material will be removed.
Google would then remove all links to foxnews.com?
Silencing an opponent's speech now? That's what Hugo Chavez is doing. You are in an interesting company :-)
Yep, which would require a concerted effort to gather the required data
And, as I suggested, the law forbids every individual element of such an effort simply because this way there is no need to prove that a concerted effort was ever attempted. In other words, it is illegal for you to give me a non-fatal dose of a poison (even though it won't kill me) because if you do it several times I will die. The law doesn't want to know if you did it several times or got scared after a first few doses. Each such attempt is a crime in itself, just because there is no lawful reason to covertly administer small, non-lethal doses of poison.
If that were true, I could go to jail every time windows picks up a new access point.
The SSID is public information (like a name plate on the door,) and as far as I know Windows doesn't capture anything else. Google captured and stored everything.
There is an easy way to encrypt your packets.
First, many people are not sufficiently geeky to even attempt that. I don't think we can deny them the safety and the privacy just because we, geeks, have the knowledge to break into their poorly configured networks and do whatever we want on their LANs. A door, locked or not, is not a sufficient protection against a burglar. However a closed door means "do not enter," and anyone who ignores this norm of the society is behaving antisocially.
Second, WiFi can use several encryption methods, and different devices on the network may support some subset of them. Not all supported encryption modes work well in all devices. For example, I recall having a router that liked to drop encrypted connections now and then. Sometimes a device is an embedded 802.11 module, with minimum interface. Sometimes it is an old PDA, or a new smartphone... In all cases the unencrypted connection is the lowest common denominator, and it is the one that has the best chance of working well. There is also performance penalty for encryption, that might be important if you stream video from cameras, for example. Also if there are guest devices, it is quite inconvenient to distribute key material to guests (and then worry about its security, or change the keys after guests leave.)
It is true that a hardcore privacy enthusiast should do everything in their power to hide, encrypt and otherwise make their communication invisible to others. But there are well understood reasons to not do so and still expect other people to be polite enough to not spy. Most people don't have steel sheets for curtains, though many common curtains can be seen through... people just expect that nobody would be peering into their windows at night. Curtains are a sign to "keep out", not a barrier.
Is something stored if it is never accessed?
Imagine that you had some inconvenient photos, and if those photos are "accessed" your political career will end. Someone stole the photos. But they called you to assure that those photos will be never accessed. Will that be as good as if you personally destroyed all media those photos were on?
If just the potential to access it is enough then we're all guilty because we all have the "potential" to access the open Wifi networks in the first place.
I can't imagine a sane situation where a potential to commit a crime is the same as the crime itself. However one guy was recently arrested (illegally) and his lawful property "held" for a crime that other people thought he might be considering committing in the future.
If I copy down 2 digits from your credit card number, I've "captured" your "personal data", but there's dick-all I can do with it.
It may well be that one day I paid with my c/c and you noted first two digits. Indeed nothing you can do with them. Next day I again paid with my c/c and you noted next two digits. Now it makes four. Next day ... [repeat until the logical end.] This is how you can get my entire c/c record. Any single observation is useless; but when combined they are very much useful.
The law in question doesn't try to measure the harm of each individual intercept because that would also require consideration of cumulative harm. The society instead decided to prohibit all intercepts since they have hardly any social advantages to begin with. One could argue that the society should benefit from Google's WiFi-assisted mapping, but that "should" is very subjective. Some people want more privacy than the other, even if they are not competent enough to configure their WiFi better (or not to run it.)
A professional of privacy studies would lock and bar the door; a casual user of privacy would just hang a note "please do not enter" on an unlocked door. Unless you have a good reason to believe that some particular access point is public (free for anyone to connect) you should assume that the "do not enter" note is present, along with the SSID of the AP. Entering, or listening at the door is rude.
Likewise, if I copy down your full name and address from the phone book, I've "captured" a chunk of your "personal data" which may actually be useful, but did I do anything wrong?
It depends on how you use that data. This example is different from the c/c number because there is a value in publishing people's addresses and phone numbers (at least to Terminators; I don't know anyone else who uses phone books.) Besides, there is an easy way to have an unlisted phone number.