When a car moves 1 mile on 1 gallon of gas, it is using 33.6 kWh worth of energy to travel one mile. The more miles you can get on a single gallon of gas, the more efficient it is - i.e. the closer it gets to using 100% of the energy (that 33.6kWh) in a gallon of gas to move the car.
There are some natural inefficiencies that prop up with burning gas - one is that you may not burn it all, but for every gallon of gas moved through a gallon is counted. Another is heat, a percentage of what is burned does not get turned into kinetic energy, it gets turned into thermal energy. That's an inefficiency. All of this lowers the MPG. It in no way, shape, or form changes the energy potential of a gallon of gasoline. That is a constant, at 33.6kWh. A more neutral energy measure would be joules, but I'm too lazy to do the math.
Anyway, because the energy potential of gasoline is a constant, we can compare it to an electric vehicle's energy efficiency by marking off the miles we get after using up that same amount of energy - 33.6kWh. So, if an electric car can go 100 miles on 33.6kWh of energy, it is equivalent to a car that gets 100mpg. They are the same. It is a conversion. There is no difference.
Pure democracy has proven itself time and time again to be one of the most consistantly tyrannical forms of government in existance. Even Tyrannical Despotisms have a hard time topping pure democracy in that regard. It turns the entire country into a mob, and when the mob rules, everyone who is not the majority cowers in fear.
Monarchies are unpredictable, will it be 50 years of tyranny or 50 years of prosperity? An Oligarchy is just a monarchy with a board of directors, just as unpredictable as a monarchy but with a better chance of being tyrannical. Theocracies are as bad as monarchies, but have the added element of the religion dictating things. Depending on the religion it may or may not be difficult for the theocratic leader to twist it to his will.
A democratic republic is the most consistantly beneficial to the greatest number of citizens of a country. Democracy is good in small numbers, but very quickly it breaks down and becomes unwieldy. In a democratic republic we break democracy down into manageable chunks, and it works. We have a sort of oligarchy with a high accountability to the public, therefor they have a very great incentive to do the will of the public. However, the will of the public is balanced by individual representatives who, because they are separated from the public they represent, are generally not caught up in the mass hysteria that the public can sometimes generate. Nothing is perfect, but a democratic republic is as close as we have come. You can look at all of the most successful countries in the world - the safest, richest, farest countries - and they are all heavily into various incarnations of the democratic republic. Some still have trappings of old styles of government, but they still be have as a democratic republic.
Think about that the next time someone pushes to have all issues that Congress or your local legislature address voted on by the people. It is really easy to swing from the best system ever concieved to the worst system to have ever existed.
The only reason Capitalism is any good is, if it is kept in check properly and not overly imposed upon (it requires both), it naturally adjusts itself to provide the most benefit possible to the economy it is used in. No other system can touch the flexibility and efficiency of capitalism, but obviously it is easy for it to go astray with poor oversight. The recent economic troubles are a wonderful example of poor management of capitalism. The government was imposing far too many demands in some areas, and putting in too few restrictions in others.
But if you want to change it out with Communism or Fascism, go ahead. Why you'd want to replace Capitalism, which has shown itself to work better than anything else, with a system that has failed spectacularly every time it has been tried is beyond me. Other forms of socialism don't count, they're all just hybrid bastardizations of capitalism. Bartering is out of the question, it is far too inflexible for any kind of large economy.
Not if only 1 in 3000 are terrorists, then it is impossible for 299 of the 300 detained to be terrorists. You'll be detaining 299 innocent people and 1 terrorist. BUT! The terrorist also has a 1 in 10 chance to go undetected, so you may not have even nabbed him at all (but you probably did).
300 out of 3,000 is already pretty unreasonable to sift through, but scale it out to 30,000 or 300,000 and you have a real problem. What do you do when 30,000 people come up as terrorists? This isn't the Middle East, obviously 30,000 out of 300,000 (a smallish city) are not terrorists. Even worse, say there were actually 1,000 terrorists to begin with, well 100 were missed completely, in addition to the ones that you caught but still need to sift through to be sure. It only took 20 terrorists to carry out the largest terrorist attack in history.
What good is the 90% accurate screening? In this case, to bring things into manageable levels, it would need to be at least 99.9% accurate, though if it were 99.99% accurate you wouldn't have to do much sifting at all and it would be a quite reliable test.
The whole point of this thing is that it is a USB stick with 256gb of flash. If you drop this USB stick, it should not be harmed unless it falls from very, very high. Drop your Passport Essential off a table and chances are it is toast.
They are used for different purposes, they cannot be compared directly. I personally would never buy one, and being custom order I don't think Kingston believes there is a big market for them either. However, someone will find a use for them, and will buy them, and that's great for them.
My company, a huge multinational company, recently switched to Altiris for inventory tracking, license management, and software delivery.
From what I can tell, on a global network with somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 machines, it's ok for inventory, great for controling licenses, and terrible at software delivery.
Using Altiris it takes upwards of ten times longer to install applications that reside on the same servers that our old in-house scripting team used. Servers didn't move, same applications, 10 times longer to install. Setting up an old user with a new machine can now take hours instead of a few minutes (I'm talking after the build up and profile transfer).
The problem may have been with the implimentation for our particular situation, the concept and feature list I think are brillient. That doesn't change the fact that the word Altiris makes me shudder involuntarily now.
Lucky for me, I moved to a different group and get to manage my own, separate internal network of about 400 machines.
P.S.: Slashdot is not really a news site. It looks like it is, but it isn't. It's a news aggregation site who'd primary "feature" is the opinions of fellow slashdotters. Most news sites don't recieve or want comments on their stories. Slashdot does, and the entire site is built around facilitating that. Go check out a slashdot story sometime to see what I mean. There will be a 200 word summary post and 150 comments, most of them centered on three or four discussions. That's Slashdot's added value to the news they serve. Hell, half the time the news here is stone cold, broke out days weeks or months before Slashdot got ahold of it, but the discussions make it interesting.
I haven't heard much about China, but in Japan (8th highest suicide rate) "losing face" can end your career. Submitting a bad report and having your boss say "Maybe you should re-write that" is akin to a death sentance. Their career at best will go nowhere, and at worst the boss will soon find another place for you. That doesn't pay as well. If at all./enddramaticuseofperiod
Different cultures are different. That should be apparent. In the US, a high importance is placed on the individual. Selfishness reigns, and if your boss tells you your project sucks, he can shove it. If he tries to stifle your career, you can go somewhere else. Other cultures see things differently, and a person who leaves one company for no apparent reason may be seen as tainted, and not welcome somewhere else.
I can't apply that directly to this case, but you get the point. You can't look at another culture from your culture's point of view and expect to make sense of it. You can compare cultures, but that's a whole 'nuther exercise, and an extremely difficult one to be objective while doing it.
The results may be patented, i.e. a new type of telescope design that offers 3x the resolution of current designs, or a process for measuring the amount of some molecule in the blood can be patented. Both of those, however, must pass the test of being novel.
Promethius patented the process for measuring a particular drug in the blood. They Mayo Clinic developed their own process for detecting the same drug, which is different from Promethius's process. Promethius sued. The district court decided that not only did the Mayo Clinic's process not violate Promethius's patent (which is probably what they would have ruled, had they not decided the way they did), they decided the patent did not contain enough patentable material, and so was invalid.
It's fine to patent a process if it is unique and non-obvious. If it is an improvement on current techniques, I hope you make bank off it. But patenting a well-known indicator of drug levels (the idea has been around since 1840 for heaven's sake!) and simply tailoring it to a particular drug is not sufficient.
Some people have noted that a lot of research probably went into refining the process for this test. It is becoming clear that it is the value as a novel idea that makes a product patent-worthy, not the effort that goes into it. The same is becoming clear of copyright. It doesn't matter how much money you spent refining it, if all you did was something anybody in the field could do given the time and money, it is not worthy of a patent.
In this case, their test should stand on its own merit as a better, more accurate test. It does not add new knowledge, and thus does not deserve a patent. If it is not a better test, or if significantly cheaper tests are accurate enough, it should fail abysmally. It's also something that would be better protected by a trade secret, if they really don't want to share their efforts.
He wasn't talking about this specific case, he was responding to the GP (? GGP? I lose track) who said that -NO- health care related discoveries should be patentable. Which is rediculous. That's as sure a way to inhibit new medical developements from ever coming about as ever there was one.
Furthermore, the system worked, albeit later than it should have. It got caught on the final check. The district court ruled both patents invalid. Promethius will probably lose on appeal, and there will be no more absurd patent to deal with.
Probably the biggest problem with the patent system today is the volume of patent applications. We need to re-vamp the system to reward quality over quantity when submitting an application so we can stop the 30,000 page applications regarding one click shopping so our patent officers can get to the real meat of the problem. With crap like that, it's no wonder useless patents make it through.
I think he got confused with your correction of the parent of your initial reply.
Re:I would disagree with the premise.
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While that is certainly possible, that is rarely the way it actually happens. It is a bit far fetched to think you will be able to convince a jury that what is possible, but not practical and may not even be feasable, is actually what happened in your case. It would take a good deal of real evidence suggesting such, evidence that probably doesn't exist because it never happened.
A great many people have a permanent or near permanent static IP address from their ISP. Also, when an IP address is dynamic, usually the lease time is in the day or week range (an IP lease policy in the sub-single day range could kill an ISPs network with DHCP requests), and when a new IP address is requested usually the leased address is simply renewed, unless the machine that was to have an IP address assigned to it was offline at the time the lease expired. It then receives a new IP address if the old address has already been given away. If it hasn't, though, it generally recieves the same address.
What this means is that in the days of "always on" connections and home routers, even a dynamic IP usually doesn't change for weeks or months. ISPs also keep records of what IP address was assigned to what account during what times.
If you think the fact that you have a dynamic IP address assigned to a router serving three computers accessable by 5 people is going to protect you, you are very sadly mistaken. If your computer is accessable to 50+ people, or a known IP spoofer lives in your area (they are very rare, it's a horrible defense), you may have a point, and you may be able to sneak by if those people spend as much or more time on the machine they identified as the culpret as you do. But more than likely, even then they have enough evidence to sieze your computers and network equipment and inspect it.
Also bear in mind that destruction of evidence can be used as circumstantial evidence against you. If you just happened to re-format your hard drive the same day you got that subpoena, you're gonna be screwed in court. Ask Jamie Thomas.
"Whatifs" don't count as evidence in court, and are generally completely ignored if there is no evidence. Sorry.
Re:I would disagree with the premise.
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Routers often have an internal log, and at the very least there is the routing table, which matches subnet IP to MAC address, and often maintains routes for a period of time. Worst case you can find the router and say "This IP leads to one of these four computers" or whatever. From there the likely individual can be found, and further evidence can be gathered.
Furthermore, far-fetched allegations like "But what if someone spoofed my IP?" are ignored if there is no evidence to the fact. Just making the claim does not count as evidence, and the court will rightly ignore it if you cannot come up with any evidence. That crap won't even work in criminal cases, do you think it will work in civil court?
IP addresses are personally identifiable to about the same degree as a home address is, and it should be treated as the same in both in court as evidence and by privacy laws, though obviously the specific applications will be quite different.
Re:I would disagree with the premise.
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In court, and especially in civil cases, far-fetched allegations - like "what if someone spoofed my ip? - are discarded without any evidence suggesting that. In a criminal case, knowing a guy who has told you about doing that sort of thing would lead to an investigation and maybe some evidence and further investigation. In a civil case, you don't just have to introduce doubt, you have to introduce enough doubt that it is more likely than not someone else who did it.
That's hard to do when it is your personal computer on your home network.
In other words, unless you have some kind of evidence to the contrary, it's pretty clear cut.
Re:Postal addresses identify houses!I
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Nah, don't worry, they can't trace you by IP, didn't you read the story?;)
Re:Postal addresses identify houses!I
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Come on, we just want to have our cake and eat it too!
FWIW, I think the slashdot argument was initially against using IP addresses as a fingerprint like the RIAA was doing, instead of as a home address. It has since been carried away and muddied.
It takes something like this idiotic ruling to point that out and to clear things up a bit.
For an equivalent, outlandish example to make my point, tracing an IP address back to a computer is about like tracing a letter bomb back to the mail box. It does not prove which of the family of four that lives there sent it, and in fact it does not prove that it was not placed in their mailbox by a neighbor. However, it very much narrows down the search and you can be confident that the package was sent by someone from that address, with a small possibility that someone outside that address sent the package from that mail box.
Same thing with IP addresses, they can trace it back to the computer, or more likely these days the router, but beyond that it takes good old fashioned detective work to figure out exactly whodunnit.
Therefore, IP addresses ARE personally identifiable information, and as such they CAN be used as evidence in court. However, they are NOT proof that an individual committed the act in question because they are not directly tied to one individual and one individual only. They are like home addresses, not fingerprints, and should be treated the same way.
This ruling goes way out there and says they are neither, witch protects us from some crap like the RIAA, but opens us up to a whole other can of worms. I suspect this ruling will be clarified at some point, because it is rediculous.
Dude, the only thing Cue has on Que is it sounds like the correct word - que is closer to the correct spelling, but you are both still wrong.
The correct word is queue. Queue. The word is queue. Mkay? "Cue" is either a little white ball used for billiards or a predetermined signal to perform some action. Queue is either the act of placing an object in an ordered list or group pending some action, or the list/group itself.
Arguments for or against a certain thing require nothing more than an opinion and a reasoning behind it.
Evidence helps, but does not suddenly validate or invalidate a position.
For example, child porn is wrong, and its creators must be stopped because they harm the children involved.
Most people can think about that statement, and come to a valid conclusion for or against the position without requiring any bit of evidence supplied in the argument.
And yet, you gave no reason for requiring further proof in this case, though the poster gave his own witness testimony (albeit exaggerated, as he admitted) to the fact.
...we all know how much fun sodium is when it gets wet...
I suppose you make sure your table salt doesn't get wet either, eh? It's got the same chemical structure and behaves similarly to sodiumsulfide because they are both salts. Wet NaS is no more going to have a violent chemical reaction with water than NaCl (aka table salt) will.
Now, what might be a danger would be the incredibly massive transfer of thermal energy from the molten NaS to water, probably creating a super-heated steam almost instantly. I could see the area around a NaS battery becoming quite dangerous if rainwater made it past the casing, 500 degree water vapor is dangerous shit. It's still not a sodium/water explosion though.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you guys slow or what?
When a car moves 1 mile on 1 gallon of gas, it is using 33.6 kWh worth of energy to travel one mile. The more miles you can get on a single gallon of gas, the more efficient it is - i.e. the closer it gets to using 100% of the energy (that 33.6kWh) in a gallon of gas to move the car.
There are some natural inefficiencies that prop up with burning gas - one is that you may not burn it all, but for every gallon of gas moved through a gallon is counted. Another is heat, a percentage of what is burned does not get turned into kinetic energy, it gets turned into thermal energy. That's an inefficiency. All of this lowers the MPG. It in no way, shape, or form changes the energy potential of a gallon of gasoline. That is a constant, at 33.6kWh. A more neutral energy measure would be joules, but I'm too lazy to do the math.
Anyway, because the energy potential of gasoline is a constant, we can compare it to an electric vehicle's energy efficiency by marking off the miles we get after using up that same amount of energy - 33.6kWh. So, if an electric car can go 100 miles on 33.6kWh of energy, it is equivalent to a car that gets 100mpg. They are the same. It is a conversion. There is no difference.
Get it?
Pure democracy has proven itself time and time again to be one of the most consistantly tyrannical forms of government in existance. Even Tyrannical Despotisms have a hard time topping pure democracy in that regard. It turns the entire country into a mob, and when the mob rules, everyone who is not the majority cowers in fear.
Monarchies are unpredictable, will it be 50 years of tyranny or 50 years of prosperity? An Oligarchy is just a monarchy with a board of directors, just as unpredictable as a monarchy but with a better chance of being tyrannical. Theocracies are as bad as monarchies, but have the added element of the religion dictating things. Depending on the religion it may or may not be difficult for the theocratic leader to twist it to his will.
A democratic republic is the most consistantly beneficial to the greatest number of citizens of a country. Democracy is good in small numbers, but very quickly it breaks down and becomes unwieldy. In a democratic republic we break democracy down into manageable chunks, and it works. We have a sort of oligarchy with a high accountability to the public, therefor they have a very great incentive to do the will of the public. However, the will of the public is balanced by individual representatives who, because they are separated from the public they represent, are generally not caught up in the mass hysteria that the public can sometimes generate. Nothing is perfect, but a democratic republic is as close as we have come. You can look at all of the most successful countries in the world - the safest, richest, farest countries - and they are all heavily into various incarnations of the democratic republic. Some still have trappings of old styles of government, but they still be have as a democratic republic.
Think about that the next time someone pushes to have all issues that Congress or your local legislature address voted on by the people. It is really easy to swing from the best system ever concieved to the worst system to have ever existed.
The only reason Capitalism is any good is, if it is kept in check properly and not overly imposed upon (it requires both), it naturally adjusts itself to provide the most benefit possible to the economy it is used in. No other system can touch the flexibility and efficiency of capitalism, but obviously it is easy for it to go astray with poor oversight. The recent economic troubles are a wonderful example of poor management of capitalism. The government was imposing far too many demands in some areas, and putting in too few restrictions in others.
But if you want to change it out with Communism or Fascism, go ahead. Why you'd want to replace Capitalism, which has shown itself to work better than anything else, with a system that has failed spectacularly every time it has been tried is beyond me. Other forms of socialism don't count, they're all just hybrid bastardizations of capitalism. Bartering is out of the question, it is far too inflexible for any kind of large economy.
Not if only 1 in 3000 are terrorists, then it is impossible for 299 of the 300 detained to be terrorists. You'll be detaining 299 innocent people and 1 terrorist. BUT! The terrorist also has a 1 in 10 chance to go undetected, so you may not have even nabbed him at all (but you probably did).
300 out of 3,000 is already pretty unreasonable to sift through, but scale it out to 30,000 or 300,000 and you have a real problem. What do you do when 30,000 people come up as terrorists? This isn't the Middle East, obviously 30,000 out of 300,000 (a smallish city) are not terrorists. Even worse, say there were actually 1,000 terrorists to begin with, well 100 were missed completely, in addition to the ones that you caught but still need to sift through to be sure. It only took 20 terrorists to carry out the largest terrorist attack in history.
What good is the 90% accurate screening? In this case, to bring things into manageable levels, it would need to be at least 99.9% accurate, though if it were 99.99% accurate you wouldn't have to do much sifting at all and it would be a quite reliable test.
That was his point.
Rtrd.
Don't worry, corporate browsers will be upgraded as soon as YouTube drops support for IE6.
Yeah, it's only what, 5-6 times bigger?
The whole point of this thing is that it is a USB stick with 256gb of flash. If you drop this USB stick, it should not be harmed unless it falls from very, very high. Drop your Passport Essential off a table and chances are it is toast.
They are used for different purposes, they cannot be compared directly. I personally would never buy one, and being custom order I don't think Kingston believes there is a big market for them either. However, someone will find a use for them, and will buy them, and that's great for them.
Oh god, not Altiris!
My company, a huge multinational company, recently switched to Altiris for inventory tracking, license management, and software delivery.
From what I can tell, on a global network with somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 machines, it's ok for inventory, great for controling licenses, and terrible at software delivery.
Using Altiris it takes upwards of ten times longer to install applications that reside on the same servers that our old in-house scripting team used. Servers didn't move, same applications, 10 times longer to install. Setting up an old user with a new machine can now take hours instead of a few minutes (I'm talking after the build up and profile transfer).
The problem may have been with the implimentation for our particular situation, the concept and feature list I think are brillient. That doesn't change the fact that the word Altiris makes me shudder involuntarily now.
Lucky for me, I moved to a different group and get to manage my own, separate internal network of about 400 machines.
Or he could try the Ask Slashdot section.
Oh wait...
P.S.: Slashdot is not really a news site. It looks like it is, but it isn't. It's a news aggregation site who'd primary "feature" is the opinions of fellow slashdotters. Most news sites don't recieve or want comments on their stories. Slashdot does, and the entire site is built around facilitating that. Go check out a slashdot story sometime to see what I mean. There will be a 200 word summary post and 150 comments, most of them centered on three or four discussions. That's Slashdot's added value to the news they serve. Hell, half the time the news here is stone cold, broke out days weeks or months before Slashdot got ahold of it, but the discussions make it interesting.
Is text shouting that annoying when I do it?
I haven't heard much about China, but in Japan (8th highest suicide rate) "losing face" can end your career. Submitting a bad report and having your boss say "Maybe you should re-write that" is akin to a death sentance. Their career at best will go nowhere, and at worst the boss will soon find another place for you. That doesn't pay as well. If at all. /enddramaticuseofperiod
Different cultures are different. That should be apparent. In the US, a high importance is placed on the individual. Selfishness reigns, and if your boss tells you your project sucks, he can shove it. If he tries to stifle your career, you can go somewhere else. Other cultures see things differently, and a person who leaves one company for no apparent reason may be seen as tainted, and not welcome somewhere else.
I can't apply that directly to this case, but you get the point. You can't look at another culture from your culture's point of view and expect to make sense of it. You can compare cultures, but that's a whole 'nuther exercise, and an extremely difficult one to be objective while doing it.
Right, and the District Court invalidated their patent.
RTFA, or RTFPOSWRTFA (Read The F'n Post Of Someone Who Read The F'n Article), the summary kinda sucks.
Scientific Research does not get patented.
The results may be patented, i.e. a new type of telescope design that offers 3x the resolution of current designs, or a process for measuring the amount of some molecule in the blood can be patented. Both of those, however, must pass the test of being novel.
Promethius patented the process for measuring a particular drug in the blood. They Mayo Clinic developed their own process for detecting the same drug, which is different from Promethius's process. Promethius sued. The district court decided that not only did the Mayo Clinic's process not violate Promethius's patent (which is probably what they would have ruled, had they not decided the way they did), they decided the patent did not contain enough patentable material, and so was invalid.
It's fine to patent a process if it is unique and non-obvious. If it is an improvement on current techniques, I hope you make bank off it. But patenting a well-known indicator of drug levels (the idea has been around since 1840 for heaven's sake!) and simply tailoring it to a particular drug is not sufficient.
Some people have noted that a lot of research probably went into refining the process for this test. It is becoming clear that it is the value as a novel idea that makes a product patent-worthy, not the effort that goes into it. The same is becoming clear of copyright. It doesn't matter how much money you spent refining it, if all you did was something anybody in the field could do given the time and money, it is not worthy of a patent.
In this case, their test should stand on its own merit as a better, more accurate test. It does not add new knowledge, and thus does not deserve a patent. If it is not a better test, or if significantly cheaper tests are accurate enough, it should fail abysmally. It's also something that would be better protected by a trade secret, if they really don't want to share their efforts.
He wasn't talking about this specific case, he was responding to the GP (? GGP? I lose track) who said that -NO- health care related discoveries should be patentable. Which is rediculous. That's as sure a way to inhibit new medical developements from ever coming about as ever there was one.
Furthermore, the system worked, albeit later than it should have. It got caught on the final check. The district court ruled both patents invalid. Promethius will probably lose on appeal, and there will be no more absurd patent to deal with.
Probably the biggest problem with the patent system today is the volume of patent applications. We need to re-vamp the system to reward quality over quantity when submitting an application so we can stop the 30,000 page applications regarding one click shopping so our patent officers can get to the real meat of the problem. With crap like that, it's no wonder useless patents make it through.
I think he got confused with your correction of the parent of your initial reply.
While that is certainly possible, that is rarely the way it actually happens. It is a bit far fetched to think you will be able to convince a jury that what is possible, but not practical and may not even be feasable, is actually what happened in your case. It would take a good deal of real evidence suggesting such, evidence that probably doesn't exist because it never happened.
A great many people have a permanent or near permanent static IP address from their ISP. Also, when an IP address is dynamic, usually the lease time is in the day or week range (an IP lease policy in the sub-single day range could kill an ISPs network with DHCP requests), and when a new IP address is requested usually the leased address is simply renewed, unless the machine that was to have an IP address assigned to it was offline at the time the lease expired. It then receives a new IP address if the old address has already been given away. If it hasn't, though, it generally recieves the same address.
What this means is that in the days of "always on" connections and home routers, even a dynamic IP usually doesn't change for weeks or months. ISPs also keep records of what IP address was assigned to what account during what times.
If you think the fact that you have a dynamic IP address assigned to a router serving three computers accessable by 5 people is going to protect you, you are very sadly mistaken. If your computer is accessable to 50+ people, or a known IP spoofer lives in your area (they are very rare, it's a horrible defense), you may have a point, and you may be able to sneak by if those people spend as much or more time on the machine they identified as the culpret as you do. But more than likely, even then they have enough evidence to sieze your computers and network equipment and inspect it.
Also bear in mind that destruction of evidence can be used as circumstantial evidence against you. If you just happened to re-format your hard drive the same day you got that subpoena, you're gonna be screwed in court. Ask Jamie Thomas.
"Whatifs" don't count as evidence in court, and are generally completely ignored if there is no evidence. Sorry.
Routers often have an internal log, and at the very least there is the routing table, which matches subnet IP to MAC address, and often maintains routes for a period of time. Worst case you can find the router and say "This IP leads to one of these four computers" or whatever. From there the likely individual can be found, and further evidence can be gathered.
Furthermore, far-fetched allegations like "But what if someone spoofed my IP?" are ignored if there is no evidence to the fact. Just making the claim does not count as evidence, and the court will rightly ignore it if you cannot come up with any evidence. That crap won't even work in criminal cases, do you think it will work in civil court?
IP addresses are personally identifiable to about the same degree as a home address is, and it should be treated as the same in both in court as evidence and by privacy laws, though obviously the specific applications will be quite different.
In court, and especially in civil cases, far-fetched allegations - like "what if someone spoofed my ip? - are discarded without any evidence suggesting that. In a criminal case, knowing a guy who has told you about doing that sort of thing would lead to an investigation and maybe some evidence and further investigation. In a civil case, you don't just have to introduce doubt, you have to introduce enough doubt that it is more likely than not someone else who did it.
That's hard to do when it is your personal computer on your home network.
In other words, unless you have some kind of evidence to the contrary, it's pretty clear cut.
Nah, don't worry, they can't trace you by IP, didn't you read the story? ;)
Come on, we just want to have our cake and eat it too!
FWIW, I think the slashdot argument was initially against using IP addresses as a fingerprint like the RIAA was doing, instead of as a home address. It has since been carried away and muddied.
It takes something like this idiotic ruling to point that out and to clear things up a bit.
For an equivalent, outlandish example to make my point, tracing an IP address back to a computer is about like tracing a letter bomb back to the mail box. It does not prove which of the family of four that lives there sent it, and in fact it does not prove that it was not placed in their mailbox by a neighbor. However, it very much narrows down the search and you can be confident that the package was sent by someone from that address, with a small possibility that someone outside that address sent the package from that mail box.
Same thing with IP addresses, they can trace it back to the computer, or more likely these days the router, but beyond that it takes good old fashioned detective work to figure out exactly whodunnit.
Therefore, IP addresses ARE personally identifiable information, and as such they CAN be used as evidence in court. However, they are NOT proof that an individual committed the act in question because they are not directly tied to one individual and one individual only. They are like home addresses, not fingerprints, and should be treated the same way.
This ruling goes way out there and says they are neither, witch protects us from some crap like the RIAA, but opens us up to a whole other can of worms. I suspect this ruling will be clarified at some point, because it is rediculous.
Dude, the only thing Cue has on Que is it sounds like the correct word - que is closer to the correct spelling, but you are both still wrong.
The correct word is queue. Queue. The word is queue. Mkay? "Cue" is either a little white ball used for billiards or a predetermined signal to perform some action. Queue is either the act of placing an object in an ordered list or group pending some action, or the list/group itself.
Cheers.
Arguments for or against a certain thing require nothing more than an opinion and a reasoning behind it.
Evidence helps, but does not suddenly validate or invalidate a position.
For example, child porn is wrong, and its creators must be stopped because they harm the children involved.
Most people can think about that statement, and come to a valid conclusion for or against the position without requiring any bit of evidence supplied in the argument.
And yet, you gave no reason for requiring further proof in this case, though the poster gave his own witness testimony (albeit exaggerated, as he admitted) to the fact.
Hm.
Now that's a fucked up religion!
What are you going to do when a magic pixie knocks on your door?
I'd like to see you prove to me that it can't happen.
Pfft, nowhere near good enough, the earthquake in the store was one and a half orders of magnitude larger than a 6.0.
7.0 or bust (literally!).
...we all know how much fun sodium is when it gets wet...
I suppose you make sure your table salt doesn't get wet either, eh? It's got the same chemical structure and behaves similarly to sodiumsulfide because they are both salts. Wet NaS is no more going to have a violent chemical reaction with water than NaCl (aka table salt) will.
Now, what might be a danger would be the incredibly massive transfer of thermal energy from the molten NaS to water, probably creating a super-heated steam almost instantly. I could see the area around a NaS battery becoming quite dangerous if rainwater made it past the casing, 500 degree water vapor is dangerous shit. It's still not a sodium/water explosion though.