Unless Holder and Obama et al decide to abuse Executive Privilege as in the Fast & Furious fiasco, to prevent Congress and the Judicial from obtaining any evidence and/or documentation.
The fact that Holder did not do a year in jail for his contempt of Congress is prima facie proof that pretty much all of our congresspeople on both sides of the aisle are either complicit or lack testicular fortitude. Just saying.
Also, until I see proof to the country, I consider every Democrat who voted against holding Holder in contempt to be a traitor against the United States and not worthy of holding political office ever again. They chose their party over the good of the people and the public's right to hold the government accountable for its actions. There are very few truly unconscionable acts that a politician can commit under color of authority, but that's one of them.
And I'm almost offended enough by Nancy Pelosi's actions to move an hour north just so I can run against her when she comes up for reelection. But not quite.
Prosecutorial misconduct, yes, IMO. Sufficient to get them thrown out as prosecutors, maybe. Sufficient to get them sanctioned, maybe. Sufficient to get them disbarred, probably not, unless you can show a pattern of such abuse.
Murder, definitely not. There's no mens rea/malice aforethought. No intent = no murder. Manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide, perhaps, but not murder. That said, if they were prosecuted using standard prosecutorial practices these days, I'd expect them each to be charged with one count apiece of:
conspiracy to commit murder
manslaughter
criminally negligent homicide
conspiracy against rights (note that in theory, if you could find a way to convince a judge and jury that illegal incarceration constitutes kidnapping, this would carry a maximum punishment of the death penalty)
vexatious litigation
barratry
abuse of process
and about eighteen other charges just to make sure that one of them sticks. And this is what's wrong with the justice system in America today. The people who get that sort of treatment seldom deserve it, and the people who deserve that sort of treatment seldom get it.
Possibly also because judges are expected to at least pay lip service to being fair whereas a prosecutor's job appears to be to assume that the defendant is automatically guilty.
The real problem is that too many people incorrectly think that this is what the prosecutor's job is. In fact, the prosecutor's job is to exercise judgment about which crimes to prosecute based upon the available evidence. In particular, the prosecutor's job is not:
To block the admission of exculpatory evidence (except for questioning the credibility of dubious witnesses).
To conceal exculpatory evidence from the defense. Indeed, it is the legal duty of prosecutors to disclose such evidence (Brady v. Maryland).
To fabricate evidence or testimony (including intimidating witnesses) to "get a conviction" that is not in the interest of justice.
Doing anything on that list is prosecutorial misconduct, and in an ideal world, would result in sanctions and, if willful, criminal prosecution of the prosecutor in question.
The problem is that it's really hard to identify certain types of attacks in that way. For example, if there were a security hole in a web browser, unless the attacker modifies the browser to send data over a port other than port 80 or port 443, any side channel retransmission of your data is likely to be entirely transparent to any sort of external profiling that you could reasonably do. This is why it is so critically important to make sure that web browser code is, in fact, robust against attacks to begin with.
This is also arguably a valid reason for moving away from general-purpose browsers for high-security transactions, and using separate apps instead. For example, a banking app would be whitelisted for the bank, period, and if it tried to communicate with any other server, that would be suspicious.
Or we could just pass a law requiring that all financial transactions be signed using a non-Internet-connected PK crypto dongle and be done with it, but I digress.
Most small businesses don't run servers these days. They use Google Mail for their email, and they host their website in a server farm somewhere. So rules against servers don't exactly prevent business use....
That's not really relevant. First, you can't pause the movie in a theater, so a lot of goofs go unnoticed until the video release. Second, even if you could, you probably wouldn't spot it on such a large screen even if they are (technically) visible from the front row. Here's why:
If you're in the front row, although you could see small details if you were looking right at them, you're too close to the screen to usefully pay attention to the entire picture, because it occupies too much of your field of vision. Instead, you tend to concentrate on the critical action and miss things going on around it. Therefore, you are unlikely to spot the glitch from the front row.
On the flip side, if you're far enough back to comfortably look at the whole screen and take in everything, even with 20/20 vision, your eyes won't have the resolving power to see much more detail than 2K digital movie projectors can provide (2048x1080). So although you might see some detail that looks like it might be interesting, you won't be able to tell what you're looking at.
There might or might not be a middle ground where you could both notice an error and identify it, depending on the size of the erroneous feature, but in general, unless you're the sort of person who writes down time stamps and approximate screen coordinates of interesting things, then goes back to watch the movie again from the front row so that you can see what they are, you're a lot more likely to successfully identify small goofs on a smaller screen where you can pause playback, rewind, zoom in, and watch it again.
First, proper wear leveling considers the entire disk (or at least a particular slice of it) as candidates for replacement, not just the block you're writing. So when you need to write to block 345, rather than rewriting cell 345 (which has been rewritten six times already), it might elect to read block 976 at cell 976 (which has been written only once), migrate that data to cell 345, and write block 345 into cell 976.
Second, there are extra blocks specifically for replacing high-use cells. Your capacity should never shrink. With an SSD, by the time you start getting write errors, it's time to copy all the data off the drive and scrap it.
A proper wear leveling algorithm takes care of that by periodically remapping content that doesn't change often so that low-use blocks can be reclaimed into the free pool. So in effect, yes, it is true unless your wear leveling algorithm sucks.
No, the reader draws a small amount of power even when turned off. It has to use some power just to detect that you have pressed a button or touched the screen.
Even if you were correct, though, you would still be dead shorting a Lithium ion battery that is more than willing to dump enough current all at once to burn traces on the circuit board and/or its own connecting wires.
And of course, if your device miraculously avoided that fate, the battery would still be stone dead. Lithium ion batteries cannot safely be charged by the device once they fall below a certain minimum voltage (and even if they could, the battery's controller wouldn't be powered, so it would not be possible for the device to do so). So in the best case scenario, you would still have to fully disassemble the reader and replace the battery, which at retail prices would probably cost you half as much as buying a new device.
I question that number. If you only look at the printing cost, that might be true, but that's not the only part of the cost that depends on the form factor. Every book you buy includes:
Shipping costs. The publisher had to ship the books to the distributor. The distributor had to ship the books to the retailer.
Warehousing costs. The publisher had to store the printed books. The distributor had to store the printed books. The retailer has to store additional copies of the printed books.
Shelf costs. The retailer has to have physical shelf space to hold the printed books in a manner that allows the potential customers to see every book. The retailer has to have enough square footage to hold the shelf space.
In practice, these costs do not exist for digital books. The publisher distributes only a single digital copy of the book to the retailer, resulting in a negligible distribution cost. The cost of storage for the books is negligible. And apart from the storage cost, the cost of actually delivering the books to the customer is proportional to the number of books sold (or at least to the number of people browsing the website), not proportional to the number of books available.
Yeah, and an ebook reader is suited to reading lying on the couch - they're lighter and easier to use with one hand.
On the other hand, a paper book is better for reading while soaking in the tub. When you drop a trade paperback in the water, you're out a few bucks, and you are not harmed by the experience. If you drop a reader in the tub, you're out a fair chunk of change, and you probably don't want to breathe the magic smoke that erupts from it, either.
What alternative would you propose? Voting is how our political system is supposed to work. Protesting never has any real effect; if it did, we wouldn't still have kiddie porn scanners in all our nation's major airports.
I mean, really. Other than speaking up and out and hoping that others will listen, what remains? I suppose running for office might work, and at some point, I suppose a few of us will eventually stoop to that, but it seems like there must be a way to convince people who actually want to run for office that they should do what is best for the country instead of mindlessly bloc voting by party. Because if that is not possible, then democracy has failed, and will probably always eventually fail, given enough time, for the same reason that major utilities eventually degrade to a monopoly.
You provide little actual security within your primary area of focus. Confiscating water bottles...
That's pretty much it right there. The NFL probably saw what a great job they did at preventing outside beverages inside airport security, and how much better the overpriced food vendors inside security are doing as a result, and they're probably hoping that the TSA can repeat that success at their establishment.
Yes, open source software for websites is a disaster for security. Wait, never mind, the stuff that people will know is fine to share.
I never said it was a disaster for security. I said that if a software license mandates that I make available any local changes, I cannot tweak the names of tables to further harden my installation.
What does it mean to "use" a web application?
There are two classes of users—the sysadmin and the person out there on the net. Of these, however, only one of those classes is relevant: the sysadmin. Why? Because there are really only two significant reasons that software freedom is valuable: the ability to fix bugs yourself and the ability to continue to use software after the vendor has stopped maintaining it.
The end user is irrelevant as far as maintenance is concerned. If you have arbitrary folks on the 'net using modified copies of JavaScript code with your website, that's a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen... not to mention the risk of users breaking their accounts in ways that are not easy to fix.
This leaves continuing to use the service after the vendor ceases supporting it. If random web users actually care about controlling their data, they can set up their own server, maintain it, etc. If they aren't willing to do that, no amount of theoretical "freedom" imposed by a software license is going to help those folks when the site shuts down and they no longer have access to their server-side data.
So the joe random web user's freedom is basically a hypothetical problem that nobody actually has. By contrast, the "I want to integrate this open source software with my internal systems" problem is a real problem that lots of people actually have. AGPL gives freedom to the first group by screwing over the second, which is just plain backwards.
Microsoft locks people into proprietary licenses because they know that, after a few years of using the OS they buy from them you will need a new computer and a new system, either because your old one broke or because an associate wants to do the same things as you do already. Normally, if you were allowed your natural right to copy things you own, you would just be able to copy the old one and that would work fine.
You are allowed to transfer your license as long as you wipe it from the old machine first. That doesn't mean an old OS will actually work usably on new computers, though. In fact, the odds are against it even being able to boot if the OS is more than a few years old.
This is one of the key reasons why licenses such as the AGPLv3 as well as free software foundations which can provide a neutral holder for coyprights are so important.
AGPLv3 (Affero GPL v3) is an abomination. It requires that if I make changes to your software and use them on any public-facing website, I have to make my private changes available. So now you know my database schema and other information that by any legitimate security standards should be kept private. Because it violates the spirit of the GPL by forcing you to accept a license for mere use, rather than for distribution, the AGPL is the only software license that is so completely unfree that I will not use it under any circumstances whatsoever. I consider it to be worse than commercial licenses in this regard, because at least they don't pretend to be free.
Batteries lasting a couple of days vs one has nothing to do with digital vs analog. I have had a digital (GSM) phone with a battery that lasts for two weeks easily. Batteries these days don't last more than a day because of those gigaherzes of cpu to power, inches of screen to light and constant communications for smartness.
Well, it sort of did. Analog cell phones had much higher transmit power, so they typically ran down batteries much faster. To provide the same talk time, they used bigger batteries. So when you had dual-mode phones, while in digital mode, they probably got better talk time than digital-only cell phones at the time (but still half that of modern smartphones, thanks to better battery tech).
Also, because the towers didn't have to pick up a whisper at ten miles, I suspect their antennas weren't as directional. If I'm correct in that suspicion, then the analog phones would probably have worked better from an aircraft than modern digital phones do.
That's certainly Samsung's business model, anyway. They break things in firmware updates, and then they stop shipping updates after about a year or so, so you never actually get what you paid for. From now on, the only thing I'm ever going to buy from Samsung is TVs, and even then, only the dumbest variety. I just don't trust them to do anything remotely complicated software-wise without completely screwing it up.
But in some ways, it's bigger than that. Consumer device manufacturers are good at hardware and generally suck at writing software. And they have no motivation to support that hardware after they stop selling it, or even while they're selling it. With the short product cycles of today's consumer electronics industry, by the time consumers discover how buggy the software is, the next version of the product is on the market, and potential consumers are reading a fresh set of reviews about that new product, written by people who haven't discovered the glaring flaws yet.
On a general-purpose device, by contrast, the software vendors are continuing to improve a single product over time to gain new customers, which means that everyone gets the improvements. This is why you're always better off with a general-purpose device—a laptop, an iPad connected through an Apple TV, an HTPC, whatever. And if the software sucks, you can always ditch it and install different software. You can't do that with specialized devices; if your Blu-Ray Player or TV's software sucks, you're stuck. Hence, there is no real benefit to having software-based features on those devices. If anything, the very existence of additional software on those devices is a waste of engineering resources that could be better spent making those single-purpose devices actually do the job they're supposed to do.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Holder did not do a year in jail for his contempt of Congress is prima facie proof that pretty much all of our congresspeople on both sides of the aisle are either complicit or lack testicular fortitude. Just saying.
Also, until I see proof to the country, I consider every Democrat who voted against holding Holder in contempt to be a traitor against the United States and not worthy of holding political office ever again. They chose their party over the good of the people and the public's right to hold the government accountable for its actions. There are very few truly unconscionable acts that a politician can commit under color of authority, but that's one of them.
And I'm almost offended enough by Nancy Pelosi's actions to move an hour north just so I can run against her when she comes up for reelection. But not quite.
Prosecutorial misconduct, yes, IMO. Sufficient to get them thrown out as prosecutors, maybe. Sufficient to get them sanctioned, maybe. Sufficient to get them disbarred, probably not, unless you can show a pattern of such abuse.
Murder, definitely not. There's no mens rea/malice aforethought. No intent = no murder. Manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide, perhaps, but not murder. That said, if they were prosecuted using standard prosecutorial practices these days, I'd expect them each to be charged with one count apiece of:
and about eighteen other charges just to make sure that one of them sticks. And this is what's wrong with the justice system in America today. The people who get that sort of treatment seldom deserve it, and the people who deserve that sort of treatment seldom get it.
The real problem is that too many people incorrectly think that this is what the prosecutor's job is. In fact, the prosecutor's job is to exercise judgment about which crimes to prosecute based upon the available evidence. In particular, the prosecutor's job is not:
Doing anything on that list is prosecutorial misconduct, and in an ideal world, would result in sanctions and, if willful, criminal prosecution of the prosecutor in question.
It's official. We have discovered Elbonia. Soon, Jamaica's principal export will be mud.
Some security software actually does just that (to varying degrees). For example: Little Snitch, Gatekeeper (classic Mac OS), Gatekeeper (OS X), and so on.
The problem is that it's really hard to identify certain types of attacks in that way. For example, if there were a security hole in a web browser, unless the attacker modifies the browser to send data over a port other than port 80 or port 443, any side channel retransmission of your data is likely to be entirely transparent to any sort of external profiling that you could reasonably do. This is why it is so critically important to make sure that web browser code is, in fact, robust against attacks to begin with.
This is also arguably a valid reason for moving away from general-purpose browsers for high-security transactions, and using separate apps instead. For example, a banking app would be whitelisted for the bank, period, and if it tried to communicate with any other server, that would be suspicious.
Or we could just pass a law requiring that all financial transactions be signed using a non-Internet-connected PK crypto dongle and be done with it, but I digress.
Most small businesses don't run servers these days. They use Google Mail for their email, and they host their website in a server farm somewhere. So rules against servers don't exactly prevent business use....
That's not really relevant. First, you can't pause the movie in a theater, so a lot of goofs go unnoticed until the video release. Second, even if you could, you probably wouldn't spot it on such a large screen even if they are (technically) visible from the front row. Here's why:
If you're in the front row, although you could see small details if you were looking right at them, you're too close to the screen to usefully pay attention to the entire picture, because it occupies too much of your field of vision. Instead, you tend to concentrate on the critical action and miss things going on around it. Therefore, you are unlikely to spot the glitch from the front row.
On the flip side, if you're far enough back to comfortably look at the whole screen and take in everything, even with 20/20 vision, your eyes won't have the resolving power to see much more detail than 2K digital movie projectors can provide (2048x1080). So although you might see some detail that looks like it might be interesting, you won't be able to tell what you're looking at.
There might or might not be a middle ground where you could both notice an error and identify it, depending on the size of the erroneous feature, but in general, unless you're the sort of person who writes down time stamps and approximate screen coordinates of interesting things, then goes back to watch the movie again from the front row so that you can see what they are, you're a lot more likely to successfully identify small goofs on a smaller screen where you can pause playback, rewind, zoom in, and watch it again.
I assume you mean 0.1% of cells. If there's even a single logical block not working, something is wrong.
First, proper wear leveling considers the entire disk (or at least a particular slice of it) as candidates for replacement, not just the block you're writing. So when you need to write to block 345, rather than rewriting cell 345 (which has been rewritten six times already), it might elect to read block 976 at cell 976 (which has been written only once), migrate that data to cell 345, and write block 345 into cell 976.
Second, there are extra blocks specifically for replacing high-use cells. Your capacity should never shrink. With an SSD, by the time you start getting write errors, it's time to copy all the data off the drive and scrap it.
A proper wear leveling algorithm takes care of that by periodically remapping content that doesn't change often so that low-use blocks can be reclaimed into the free pool. So in effect, yes, it is true unless your wear leveling algorithm sucks.
Yeah, but with 4K, you'll be able to zoom in and see all the details that the filmmakers hoped you wouldn't notice.
Wait, you mean that's not a benefit?
I'd be a lot more inclined to read the rest of the linked article if there weren't an egregious abuse of the apostrophe in the title....
Nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong....
No, the reader draws a small amount of power even when turned off. It has to use some power just to detect that you have pressed a button or touched the screen.
Even if you were correct, though, you would still be dead shorting a Lithium ion battery that is more than willing to dump enough current all at once to burn traces on the circuit board and/or its own connecting wires.
And of course, if your device miraculously avoided that fate, the battery would still be stone dead. Lithium ion batteries cannot safely be charged by the device once they fall below a certain minimum voltage (and even if they could, the battery's controller wouldn't be powered, so it would not be possible for the device to do so). So in the best case scenario, you would still have to fully disassemble the reader and replace the battery, which at retail prices would probably cost you half as much as buying a new device.
I question that number. If you only look at the printing cost, that might be true, but that's not the only part of the cost that depends on the form factor. Every book you buy includes:
In practice, these costs do not exist for digital books. The publisher distributes only a single digital copy of the book to the retailer, resulting in a negligible distribution cost. The cost of storage for the books is negligible. And apart from the storage cost, the cost of actually delivering the books to the customer is proportional to the number of books sold (or at least to the number of people browsing the website), not proportional to the number of books available.
Maybe, but when that happens, you've lost a $5-10 paperback instead of a $100-900 reader/tablet.
On the other hand, a paper book is better for reading while soaking in the tub. When you drop a trade paperback in the water, you're out a few bucks, and you are not harmed by the experience. If you drop a reader in the tub, you're out a fair chunk of change, and you probably don't want to breathe the magic smoke that erupts from it, either.
What alternative would you propose? Voting is how our political system is supposed to work. Protesting never has any real effect; if it did, we wouldn't still have kiddie porn scanners in all our nation's major airports.
I mean, really. Other than speaking up and out and hoping that others will listen, what remains? I suppose running for office might work, and at some point, I suppose a few of us will eventually stoop to that, but it seems like there must be a way to convince people who actually want to run for office that they should do what is best for the country instead of mindlessly bloc voting by party. Because if that is not possible, then democracy has failed, and will probably always eventually fail, given enough time, for the same reason that major utilities eventually degrade to a monopoly.
So what you're saying is that our only hope is getting invaded by Canada, I take it.
On the other hand, the invasion by Mexico is already happening a few people at a time. Maybe they'll turn things around eventually.
That's pretty much it right there. The NFL probably saw what a great job they did at preventing outside beverages inside airport security, and how much better the overpriced food vendors inside security are doing as a result, and they're probably hoping that the TSA can repeat that success at their establishment.
I never said it was a disaster for security. I said that if a software license mandates that I make available any local changes, I cannot tweak the names of tables to further harden my installation.
There are two classes of users—the sysadmin and the person out there on the net. Of these, however, only one of those classes is relevant: the sysadmin. Why? Because there are really only two significant reasons that software freedom is valuable: the ability to fix bugs yourself and the ability to continue to use software after the vendor has stopped maintaining it.
The end user is irrelevant as far as maintenance is concerned. If you have arbitrary folks on the 'net using modified copies of JavaScript code with your website, that's a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen... not to mention the risk of users breaking their accounts in ways that are not easy to fix.
This leaves continuing to use the service after the vendor ceases supporting it. If random web users actually care about controlling their data, they can set up their own server, maintain it, etc. If they aren't willing to do that, no amount of theoretical "freedom" imposed by a software license is going to help those folks when the site shuts down and they no longer have access to their server-side data.
So the joe random web user's freedom is basically a hypothetical problem that nobody actually has. By contrast, the "I want to integrate this open source software with my internal systems" problem is a real problem that lots of people actually have. AGPL gives freedom to the first group by screwing over the second, which is just plain backwards.
You are allowed to transfer your license as long as you wipe it from the old machine first. That doesn't mean an old OS will actually work usably on new computers, though. In fact, the odds are against it even being able to boot if the OS is more than a few years old.
AGPLv3 (Affero GPL v3) is an abomination. It requires that if I make changes to your software and use them on any public-facing website, I have to make my private changes available. So now you know my database schema and other information that by any legitimate security standards should be kept private. Because it violates the spirit of the GPL by forcing you to accept a license for mere use, rather than for distribution, the AGPL is the only software license that is so completely unfree that I will not use it under any circumstances whatsoever. I consider it to be worse than commercial licenses in this regard, because at least they don't pretend to be free.
That's only the first half of it. First, file a legal trademark on the name. Then file a UDRP complaint and take the domain.
Well, it sort of did. Analog cell phones had much higher transmit power, so they typically ran down batteries much faster. To provide the same talk time, they used bigger batteries. So when you had dual-mode phones, while in digital mode, they probably got better talk time than digital-only cell phones at the time (but still half that of modern smartphones, thanks to better battery tech).
Also, because the towers didn't have to pick up a whisper at ten miles, I suspect their antennas weren't as directional. If I'm correct in that suspicion, then the analog phones would probably have worked better from an aircraft than modern digital phones do.
That's certainly Samsung's business model, anyway. They break things in firmware updates, and then they stop shipping updates after about a year or so, so you never actually get what you paid for. From now on, the only thing I'm ever going to buy from Samsung is TVs, and even then, only the dumbest variety. I just don't trust them to do anything remotely complicated software-wise without completely screwing it up.
But in some ways, it's bigger than that. Consumer device manufacturers are good at hardware and generally suck at writing software. And they have no motivation to support that hardware after they stop selling it, or even while they're selling it. With the short product cycles of today's consumer electronics industry, by the time consumers discover how buggy the software is, the next version of the product is on the market, and potential consumers are reading a fresh set of reviews about that new product, written by people who haven't discovered the glaring flaws yet.
On a general-purpose device, by contrast, the software vendors are continuing to improve a single product over time to gain new customers, which means that everyone gets the improvements. This is why you're always better off with a general-purpose device—a laptop, an iPad connected through an Apple TV, an HTPC, whatever. And if the software sucks, you can always ditch it and install different software. You can't do that with specialized devices; if your Blu-Ray Player or TV's software sucks, you're stuck. Hence, there is no real benefit to having software-based features on those devices. If anything, the very existence of additional software on those devices is a waste of engineering resources that could be better spent making those single-purpose devices actually do the job they're supposed to do.