Considering that the product in question involves booting the system from a 'forensically sound' operating system on CD (I guess someone hasn't thought too much about the prospects for a virtualization-based rootkit hidden in the BIOS...), it's a safe bet TrueCrypt volumes won't be mounted.
No list of tech disappointments could be complete with the Intel 432. Object oriented machine code and hardware-assisted garbage collection - what's not to love?
You missed the laptop for goth geek femme dykes (yes, we exist, please knock off stereotyping lesbians like that) that I would want. I'm imagining something like this, except with somewhat tarnished silver trim and wood several shades darker, and maybe some nice black velvet accents on the keyboard to rest my wrists on.
Of course, I probably wouldn't actually care enough what my laptop looks like to buy it if it did exist, if it's a matter of choosing that or the nice plain-looking Thinkpad I have that doesn't need any horrible binary kernel modules for X to work and that I didn't have to pay for a Windows license I'll never use to buy. Marketing to specific niches is all well and good, but it only works when those niches are big enough to cover the fixed costs on the product line. I'm guessing that goth lesbian femme geeks who insist on strictly open-source systems, for example, is much too tiny a niche. Considering that, I can understand the frustration, but it does seem silly to get too offended at niche marketing aimed only at the much larger groups that are closer to cultural norms.
So, they should have a range higher than 0.5% and have even worse quantization error at the low end? Lower than 0.5% and have distortion due to saturation? Why exactly are you defending this bullshit?
Clearly, what they *should* do is pick an upper cutoff that's easy to achieve with the hardware they have and also large enough compared to the values encountered in practice to avoid distorting the measurements, and then carry enough bits of precision to cover the two decimal digits they give the readings in. This is going to be more than four.
Yeah, exactly. Well, they still shouldn't be covering up their limited precision in the last digits by just suppressing them. They should be reporting a confidence interval. Trying to get the average cop to understand the concept of measurement error is probably hopeless, though.
Well, if we assume the machine was sensitive up to the LD50 for ethanol of 0.5% BAC, then with only 4 bits of precision the uncertainty just from the rounding error is comparable to the difference between being over the limit and being completely sober. This was covered in the comments on Bruce Schneier's blog. That one's probably wrecked a few peoples' lives too.
Read the article. The code in question, among other things, calculates an arithmetic mean of a sequence of values by successively averaging each value with the mean of all the previous ones, and reduces 12 bits of precision coming from the hardware sensor to 4 for some unspecified but undoubtedly stupid reason.
So, it's basically 15X cocaine, except diluted in air instead of water. Must be a great buzz. The downside: it's so addictive you die within minutes as soon as you stop breathing.
LSD is psychoactive at low doses that are still five orders of magnitude larger than the concentration per cubic meter they reported for cocaine. I'm guessing that whatever concentration they found for LSD was a lot lower than that.
Tea wouldn't work, sadly. THC needs a non-polar solvent, so water's no good. There has to be an oil or fat to dissolve it in. I have a had a rather tasty and intoxicating pesto-like sauce made from it on pasta, though.
You got me beat by a year. I used the Slackware CD in 1996, on my shiny new 166 MHz Pentium with a whopping 32M of memory, and ended up staying up all night fighting with video front/back porch timings in XF86Config after I'd gotten over being scared by the dire warning that it would destroy my monitor if I got it wrong. I would go chase the kids off my lawn now, except I was 13 at the time, so I'm not quite old enough for that yet.:)
I suppose you think everyone who ever supported any laws against child pornography was motivated solely by a pure and noble desire to Protect The Children. Yes, that motive is probably the dominant factor in most cases, but it doesn't exist without a cultural context. If that's really all there is to it, then why is the age cutoff set so absurdly high, so that for every one of us, several years elapse during which we are physically mature or nearly so and experience essentially adult sexuality, but we are officially forbidden to express it? It isn't just pornography. Why are age of consent laws with high age cutoffs so widespread (16 or higher in every state of the US, and there are 12 states where it's 18)? Do the supporters of those laws really, honestly believe that no one under 16 has ever genuinely consented to sex, or do they just think they really *shouldn't* consent and so their sexual freedom is acceptable collateral damage? Why do so many jurisdictions have higher ages of consent for homosexual acts than for heterosexual ones, if not that they see 'deviant' queer sex as even more threatening than the hetero variety for which they must grudgingly concede the necessity? Why are there jurisdictions where *adults* are not recognized as able to consent to BDSM, and where this is still activelyprosecuted?
Why does this prosecuter believe it is his place to 'be proactive' and actively seek to harm this girl 'for her own good'? Where are there social structures established to enable and encourage him to do this, and people willing to stand up and defend him for it? Can't you imagine a world where the prevailing reaction to this sort of thing is 'Ah, to be young and in love', and where the impulse to control and repress is seen as threatening?
So, yeah, I'll agree that the genuine desire to protect vulnerable children is a big motivator, but that's not even close to the whole of it. There is a pervasive and deeply rooted attitude in this culture that sexuality is somehow less than legitimate, and this leads to the idealization of childhood as a time of 'innocence' before sexual awareness begins. Thus, there is an intense reaction to anything which seems to threaten that mythology, so we get not merely a ban on child pornography, but one which defines anyone under 18 as a 'child' and makes this absurdity possible. We get not merely an age of consent, but one which ignores the very possibility of the genuine sexual expression of a large class of people. For that matter, consider abstinence-only sex education. A lot of people on the socially conservative side of this give a very convincing appearance of believing, or at least wanting to uphold, an official myth that no one under the age of 18 ever has a sexual thought unless 'corrupted' by adults.
No, I don't believe in drawing arbitrary lines that criminalize people for consenting sex acts, no matter what their ages, and I'm really not a great fan of the whole concept of law.
Do you really, honestly believe that there aren't people out there who would love to ban pornography, and that the cultural attitudes toward sex which enable them don't also support this sort of oppressive garbage?
*sigh* Don't you know anything? It objectified and exploited her, and anyway she didn't really choose to do it because she had internalized patriarchal gender roles. Or was it that her virtue and chastity must be protected even from herself to keep her from sinning and ending up in Hell? Well, whatever it is, clearly she should spend the next few years in prison, and she should probably start wearing a burqa just to be safe. It's for her own good.
Note to mods: if I were being any more sarcastic than I am, I would overflow and wrap all the way around to sincerity.
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Neither are most cops. I wouldn't be too surprised if just changing your BIOS settings to never boot from CD were sufficient to thoroughly stump them.
Considering that the product in question involves booting the system from a 'forensically sound' operating system on CD (I guess someone hasn't thought too much about the prospects for a virtualization-based rootkit hidden in the BIOS...), it's a safe bet TrueCrypt volumes won't be mounted.
No list of tech disappointments could be complete with the Intel 432. Object oriented machine code and hardware-assisted garbage collection - what's not to love?
You missed the laptop for goth geek femme dykes (yes, we exist, please knock off stereotyping lesbians like that) that I would want. I'm imagining something like this, except with somewhat tarnished silver trim and wood several shades darker, and maybe some nice black velvet accents on the keyboard to rest my wrists on.
Of course, I probably wouldn't actually care enough what my laptop looks like to buy it if it did exist, if it's a matter of choosing that or the nice plain-looking Thinkpad I have that doesn't need any horrible binary kernel modules for X to work and that I didn't have to pay for a Windows license I'll never use to buy. Marketing to specific niches is all well and good, but it only works when those niches are big enough to cover the fixed costs on the product line. I'm guessing that goth lesbian femme geeks who insist on strictly open-source systems, for example, is much too tiny a niche. Considering that, I can understand the frustration, but it does seem silly to get too offended at niche marketing aimed only at the much larger groups that are closer to cultural norms.
I think he's pretty much settled on fucktard, a category which transcends all gender roles.
Does it come with a $5 shake?
So, they should have a range higher than 0.5% and have even worse quantization error at the low end? Lower than 0.5% and have distortion due to saturation? Why exactly are you defending this bullshit?
Clearly, what they *should* do is pick an upper cutoff that's easy to achieve with the hardware they have and also large enough compared to the values encountered in practice to avoid distorting the measurements, and then carry enough bits of precision to cover the two decimal digits they give the readings in. This is going to be more than four.
Yeah, exactly. Well, they still shouldn't be covering up their limited precision in the last digits by just suppressing them. They should be reporting a confidence interval. Trying to get the average cop to understand the concept of measurement error is probably hopeless, though.
They spend years trying to rebuild their lives after the State destroyed them. Isn't justice wonderful?
Well, if we assume the machine was sensitive up to the LD50 for ethanol of 0.5% BAC, then with only 4 bits of precision the uncertainty just from the rounding error is comparable to the difference between being over the limit and being completely sober. This was covered in the comments on Bruce Schneier's blog. That one's probably wrecked a few peoples' lives too.
Yeah, you consume around 500 mL of air up to 20 times a minute, which comes to 14.4 cubic meters per day. I somehow doubt this is going to make a difference.
Read the article. The code in question, among other things, calculates an arithmetic mean of a sequence of values by successively averaging each value with the mean of all the previous ones, and reduces 12 bits of precision coming from the hardware sensor to 4 for some unspecified but undoubtedly stupid reason.
So, it's basically 15X cocaine, except diluted in air instead of water. Must be a great buzz. The downside: it's so addictive you die within minutes as soon as you stop breathing.
LSD is psychoactive at low doses that are still five orders of magnitude larger than the concentration per cubic meter they reported for cocaine. I'm guessing that whatever concentration they found for LSD was a lot lower than that.
Ewwww. Please kill me now. I can't bear to live with those mental images.
On the other hand, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.unix really does exist. :)
(Just thought of this, so replying to myself)
You could try mate de coca if you're looking for a Schedule I tea, though. :)
Tea wouldn't work, sadly. THC needs a non-polar solvent, so water's no good. There has to be an oil or fat to dissolve it in. I have a had a rather tasty and intoxicating pesto-like sauce made from it on pasta, though.
You got me beat by a year. I used the Slackware CD in 1996, on my shiny new 166 MHz Pentium with a whopping 32M of memory, and ended up staying up all night fighting with video front/back porch timings in XF86Config after I'd gotten over being scared by the dire warning that it would destroy my monitor if I got it wrong. I would go chase the kids off my lawn now, except I was 13 at the time, so I'm not quite old enough for that yet. :)
Well, clearly, they meant 4*pi steradians anyway.
Ah, but this place preserves my geekly pallor. :)
I wish I could mod this to +6 right now.
I suppose you think everyone who ever supported any laws against child pornography was motivated solely by a pure and noble desire to Protect The Children. Yes, that motive is probably the dominant factor in most cases, but it doesn't exist without a cultural context. If that's really all there is to it, then why is the age cutoff set so absurdly high, so that for every one of us, several years elapse during which we are physically mature or nearly so and experience essentially adult sexuality, but we are officially forbidden to express it? It isn't just pornography. Why are age of consent laws with high age cutoffs so widespread (16 or higher in every state of the US, and there are 12 states where it's 18)? Do the supporters of those laws really, honestly believe that no one under 16 has ever genuinely consented to sex, or do they just think they really *shouldn't* consent and so their sexual freedom is acceptable collateral damage? Why do so many jurisdictions have higher ages of consent for homosexual acts than for heterosexual ones, if not that they see 'deviant' queer sex as even more threatening than the hetero variety for which they must grudgingly concede the necessity? Why are there jurisdictions where *adults* are not recognized as able to consent to BDSM, and where this is still actively prosecuted?
Why does this prosecuter believe it is his place to 'be proactive' and actively seek to harm this girl 'for her own good'? Where are there social structures established to enable and encourage him to do this, and people willing to stand up and defend him for it? Can't you imagine a world where the prevailing reaction to this sort of thing is 'Ah, to be young and in love', and where the impulse to control and repress is seen as threatening?
So, yeah, I'll agree that the genuine desire to protect vulnerable children is a big motivator, but that's not even close to the whole of it. There is a pervasive and deeply rooted attitude in this culture that sexuality is somehow less than legitimate, and this leads to the idealization of childhood as a time of 'innocence' before sexual awareness begins. Thus, there is an intense reaction to anything which seems to threaten that mythology, so we get not merely a ban on child pornography, but one which defines anyone under 18 as a 'child' and makes this absurdity possible. We get not merely an age of consent, but one which ignores the very possibility of the genuine sexual expression of a large class of people. For that matter, consider abstinence-only sex education. A lot of people on the socially conservative side of this give a very convincing appearance of believing, or at least wanting to uphold, an official myth that no one under the age of 18 ever has a sexual thought unless 'corrupted' by adults.
No, I don't believe in drawing arbitrary lines that criminalize people for consenting sex acts, no matter what their ages, and I'm really not a great fan of the whole concept of law.
Do you really, honestly believe that there aren't people out there who would love to ban pornography, and that the cultural attitudes toward sex which enable them don't also support this sort of oppressive garbage?
*sigh* Don't you know anything? It objectified and exploited her, and anyway she didn't really choose to do it because she had internalized patriarchal gender roles. Or was it that her virtue and chastity must be protected even from herself to keep her from sinning and ending up in Hell? Well, whatever it is, clearly she should spend the next few years in prison, and she should probably start wearing a burqa just to be safe. It's for her own good.
Note to mods: if I were being any more sarcastic than I am, I would overflow and wrap all the way around to sincerity.