Unless earth is much more exceptional than what we think there is hard to imagine reasons for robbing or killing us.
If FTL travel is possible and there are advanced civilizations somehwere I find it more likely that they'd just ignore us. Perhaps there are literally billions of planets out there that are inhabited by mostly harmless, boring little monkey-like creatures.
Funny coincidence. I just had a nice evening with two old friends who are both professional jazz musicians, and also talked about copyright issues with them. While they definitely do support getting some compensation for record sales and broadcasts (but do not support large record labels or criminal lawsuits for copyright violation), they make their living first and foremost from live performances and secondly, less money but in a more relaible manner, from teaching at music schools. So do all of their colleagues. They are neither rich nor poor and generally have a very good life.
So at least this little anecdote confirms your opinion.
The article points to the prosecutors, but these are not the real problem. The real problem are the laws. Democratic principles of rule of law do not only concern rights of due process but also the laws themselves. Laws that allow sentences ranging from a fine up to 35 years in prison for the same crime at the discretion of the prosecutors and judge are inherently injust. That should be obvious to anyone.
As for plea bargaining itself, I personally have always considered that injust, too, because it mostly works advantagous to people with lots of money and smart lawyers. That's probably more debatable. Anyway its the system of laws themselves that would need a thorough reform - which will never happen.
Nobody gives a damn about your data, with good statistical confidence.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. There are tens of thousands of small high-tech companies with trade secrets that the "cloud" providers would like to gain as customers. From source code to email and customer data such companies have all kinds of valuable data. The solution is, of course, not to put any of this data into the cloud except in fully encrypted form for georedundant backups.
Trust is a relative measure. I would trust Mega with storing personal copies of my favorite TV show, so I can e.g. access them on my tablet elsewhere. I wouldn't trust Mega with all my banking details, trade secrets, or highly sensitive government secrets, and would dare to say Mega has not been invented for that purpose...
Mega's response is quite reasonable and not ignorant at all. They adequately address all the incorrect claims and FUD that has been spread about their security, and do so in a timely manner.
Your response, however, makes less sense. You say: "SSL is fine, however it isn't the end all be all [sic!] in security" Who claimed so? Certainly not Mega. They are a file storage service, not Fort Knox! (The rest of your post has nothing to do with Mega's security, so we can skip that.)
Reading about this Contiguous Memory Allocator feature, and since I'm currently developing a (toy) programming language in my spare time, I was wondering why Linux doesn't include a garbage collector as system-wide service. It's not easy to implement GCs and particularly concurrent ones, so wouldn't it make sense to offer garbage collection as an OS service?
1. Cars will be 5 years past QQ plates, rebuiling all new custom aftermarket electronics from scratch will be an option for collectors. No one else is going to care.
??? I know people who drive 30 year old cars and certainly not as collector items.
2. Airplanes generally retire after around 10 years. There is no reason to expect 25 year old airplanes sitll flying, without of course many many many major overhauls, to include electronics.
Make that 30 years, too. Yes, the electronics will get overhauled during that period, as all the other things, except for the software. It's part of an ultra-expensive validation and certification process that will not be repeated unless strictly necessary.
4. the useful life of a desktop computer is around 5-7 years. it might get a secondary life used for "projects" that don't require modern CPU power, giving it a secondary life of another 7-10 years, as legacy, doing basic tasks.
Fair enough, but you're missing the #1 use of computing devices: embedded systems. For most of them there is no reason to go 64bit, many of them are still 8 bit even. My calculator uses a Z-80 processor from the 70s, these CPUs are becoming less common but are still in production.
While it seems likely that Mega's encryption is not exactly the creme de la creme of crypto implementations, I have also read some pretty dubious assessments of its cryptography, for example the review at Ars Technica which spreads more FUD than facts. Or take the claim in one of the above articles claims that the FBI is probably already typing their search warrants, which ignores the fact that this time not a single server is located within the US.
Perhaps some writers on tech news sites fear about their ad revenues?
I think what he really says is that Kurzweil has chosen the wrong approach. It's symbolic A.I. versus connectionism again. As someone who is also working in the field I sort of agree with the critique. Rather than musing about giant neural neutworks it's probably more fruitful to link up Google's knowledge base with large common sense ontologies like Cyc, combine this with a good, modern dialogue model (not protocol-based but with real discourse relations) and then run all kinds of traditional logical and probabilistic inference mechanisms over it -- and hope that this complex thing doesn't blow up.:-)
People don't like the symbolic approach any longer because it requires some real work, especially if you combine it with probabilistic reasoning techniques; it doesn't fit well into todays 'instant-gratification' society.
Physical theft is the least of the problems. Smart phones are about the least secure devices you can find, it is impossible to program them in a secure way and if you store your passwords on a phone you can just as well not use passwords at all. As for "dumb phones" with proprietary OS and no possibility to write custom software, well, these could be made reasonably secure but it's not going to happen.
A little security token device with encrypted backup to PC on the other hand could work as long as its software and hardware were entirely open source (for auditing).
Companies only have limited resources and need to limit their product ranges. The more "cloud" products a company produces, the less traditional products will it produce (unless it is expanding in a fairly extreme way). Hence, for people like me who don't care at all about the "cloud" many choices are being removed, resulting in less competition, higher prices, and overall less possibilities.
Take for example Germany. The maximum sentence for non-commercial copyright infringement is 3 years (the one that applies to the case) and the maximum sentence for commercial one is 5 years. The maximum sentence for trespassing is 1 year. Bear in mind, these are the maximum sentences. That's just an example. You will not find find any country in Europe where you could get 35 years in prison for doing what Aaron did, not even remotely.
As a rule of thumb, divide the maximum US sentence in a case by ten and your closer to the standardso of the rest of the world.
35 years was the maximum he could be sentenced to, that doesn't mean he was going to get it.
Nevertheless, despite of all the respect I have in general for the USA, a country in which someone could get 35 years in prison for downloading scientific articles seems hardly civilized to me. It's barbaric. US lawmakers would be well advised to take a look at the rest of the industrialized, democratic first world countries from time to time and check what's considered adequate there. In some domains the discrepancy has become huge.
Whats even worse about this whole sad story is that (i) it is common among scientists to request articles from public mailing lists and from friends when you cannot access them and that (ii) it is a crucial part of scientific method to be open so people can scrutinize conjectures and results.
You write as if some new method had been invented. There is no news in the above article. Authorship identification has been a reliable tool for many decades, a whole branch of linguistics (forensic linguistics) deals with it and similar topics like dialect recognition. Under certain circumstances you can even identify personality treats of the author, check out content analysis software like LIWC for example.
And, yes, plenty of serial killers and blackmailers have been captured with the help of these methods.
However, it hasn't been tested yet because no responsible emacs user uses a cell phone (because it can track you). Nevertheless, cell-phone.el works just fine if you configure and patch it correctly.
I've never been to any amusement park so I can't tell whether they are actually fun and worth it, but whenever I hear of one I'm thinking of Westworld with Yul Brynner. Oh, and by the way, whenever someone mentions McDonalds or a circus, It comes to my mind.
Needless to say I avoid amusement parks and McDonalds.
I doubt that, but anyway you should have said so from the start. Giving us the source of your figures wouldn't have harmed either.
In other words, other people arent the idiots you think that they are just because what they are telling you doesnt jive with the shit that you yourself cannot back up with facts.
I generally don't think other people are idiots but regarding you I am willing to make an exception.
By the way, measures of poverty have nothing to do with ones world view.
Poor is relative. On a global scale, nobody at all in the United States is poor.
It's not clear what point you're trying to make, because you seem to be contradicting yourself. Poverty is always relative. If you want to compare levels of poverty you cannot take into account values like "32.7% of Indians live on less then $1.25 per day" but need to consider the goods people can actually buy for the given amount of money in their country.
People who are about to starve to death in the US might fare well with the same amount of money in some rural part of India and, vice versa, an amount of money that might allow you to survive without problems in some part of the world would not allow you to survive at all in the US without the help of some charity. Such comparisons are completely pointless, because people have to survive where they are living, of course.
Back when I had a ZX-81 I regularly visited the home computer department of our local warehouse in the early eighties to take a look at better machines. One of the screens on some Atari said "Do not press a key". I pressed a key, of course, and the Atari imitated a very loud burglar alarm siren. You couldn't even stop it by pushing the reset button.:-)
Anyway, back to the topic. The wikipedia page on "killer pokes" doesn't mention the TI 99/4A but I remember the rumor that it could easily be destroyed by software. Is that true?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless earth is much more exceptional than what we think there is hard to imagine reasons for robbing or killing us.
If FTL travel is possible and there are advanced civilizations somehwere I find it more likely that they'd just ignore us. Perhaps there are literally billions of planets out there that are inhabited by mostly harmless, boring little monkey-like creatures.
Our country is theoretically "at war"
That's a pretty weird choice of words, if you think about it.
Funny coincidence. I just had a nice evening with two old friends who are both professional jazz musicians, and also talked about copyright issues with them. While they definitely do support getting some compensation for record sales and broadcasts (but do not support large record labels or criminal lawsuits for copyright violation), they make their living first and foremost from live performances and secondly, less money but in a more relaible manner, from teaching at music schools. So do all of their colleagues. They are neither rich nor poor and generally have a very good life.
So at least this little anecdote confirms your opinion.
if you don't like what apple does, maybe you can start your own multi-hundred-billion-dollar company and do it your way...
Or, don't buy Apple products. Seems like a more reasonable alternative to me. Just sayin', you know...
The article points to the prosecutors, but these are not the real problem. The real problem are the laws. Democratic principles of rule of law do not only concern rights of due process but also the laws themselves. Laws that allow sentences ranging from a fine up to 35 years in prison for the same crime at the discretion of the prosecutors and judge are inherently injust. That should be obvious to anyone.
As for plea bargaining itself, I personally have always considered that injust, too, because it mostly works advantagous to people with lots of money and smart lawyers. That's probably more debatable. Anyway its the system of laws themselves that would need a thorough reform - which will never happen.
Nobody gives a damn about your data, with good statistical confidence.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. There are tens of thousands of small high-tech companies with trade secrets that the "cloud" providers would like to gain as customers. From source code to email and customer data such companies have all kinds of valuable data. The solution is, of course, not to put any of this data into the cloud except in fully encrypted form for georedundant backups.
I admit that there was no typo in the first place, though.
What kind of weed do you smoke? I quoted him literally and used [sic] to point out a typo.
Trust is a relative measure. I would trust Mega with storing personal copies of my favorite TV show, so I can e.g. access them on my tablet elsewhere. I wouldn't trust Mega with all my banking details, trade secrets, or highly sensitive government secrets, and would dare to say Mega has not been invented for that purpose...
Mega's response is quite reasonable and not ignorant at all. They adequately address all the incorrect claims and FUD that has been spread about their security, and do so in a timely manner.
Your response, however, makes less sense. You say: "SSL is fine, however it isn't the end all be all [sic!] in security" Who claimed so? Certainly not Mega. They are a file storage service, not Fort Knox! (The rest of your post has nothing to do with Mega's security, so we can skip that.)
Reading about this Contiguous Memory Allocator feature, and since I'm currently developing a (toy) programming language in my spare time, I was wondering why Linux doesn't include a garbage collector as system-wide service. It's not easy to implement GCs and particularly concurrent ones, so wouldn't it make sense to offer garbage collection as an OS service?
1. Cars will be 5 years past QQ plates, rebuiling all new custom aftermarket electronics from scratch will be an option for collectors. No one else is going to care.
??? I know people who drive 30 year old cars and certainly not as collector items.
2. Airplanes generally retire after around 10 years. There is no reason to expect 25 year old airplanes sitll flying, without of course many many many major overhauls, to include electronics.
Make that 30 years, too. Yes, the electronics will get overhauled during that period, as all the other things, except for the software. It's part of an ultra-expensive validation and certification process that will not be repeated unless strictly necessary.
4. the useful life of a desktop computer is around 5-7 years. it might get a secondary life used for "projects" that don't require modern CPU power, giving it a secondary life of another 7-10 years, as legacy, doing basic tasks.
Fair enough, but you're missing the #1 use of computing devices: embedded systems. For most of them there is no reason to go 64bit, many of them are still 8 bit even. My calculator uses a Z-80 processor from the 70s, these CPUs are becoming less common but are still in production.
While it seems likely that Mega's encryption is not exactly the creme de la creme of crypto implementations, I have also read some pretty dubious assessments of its cryptography, for example the review at Ars Technica which spreads more FUD than facts. Or take the claim in one of the above articles claims that the FBI is probably already typing their search warrants, which ignores the fact that this time not a single server is located within the US.
Perhaps some writers on tech news sites fear about their ad revenues?
I think what he really says is that Kurzweil has chosen the wrong approach. It's symbolic A.I. versus connectionism again. As someone who is also working in the field I sort of agree with the critique. Rather than musing about giant neural neutworks it's probably more fruitful to link up Google's knowledge base with large common sense ontologies like Cyc, combine this with a good, modern dialogue model (not protocol-based but with real discourse relations) and then run all kinds of traditional logical and probabilistic inference mechanisms over it -- and hope that this complex thing doesn't blow up. :-)
People don't like the symbolic approach any longer because it requires some real work, especially if you combine it with probabilistic reasoning techniques; it doesn't fit well into todays 'instant-gratification' society.
Physical theft is the least of the problems. Smart phones are about the least secure devices you can find, it is impossible to program them in a secure way and if you store your passwords on a phone you can just as well not use passwords at all. As for "dumb phones" with proprietary OS and no possibility to write custom software, well, these could be made reasonably secure but it's not going to happen.
A little security token device with encrypted backup to PC on the other hand could work as long as its software and hardware were entirely open source (for auditing).
Companies only have limited resources and need to limit their product ranges. The more "cloud" products a company produces, the less traditional products will it produce (unless it is expanding in a fairly extreme way). Hence, for people like me who don't care at all about the "cloud" many choices are being removed, resulting in less competition, higher prices, and overall less possibilities.
Take for example Germany. The maximum sentence for non-commercial copyright infringement is 3 years (the one that applies to the case) and the maximum sentence for commercial one is 5 years. The maximum sentence for trespassing is 1 year. Bear in mind, these are the maximum sentences. That's just an example. You will not find find any country in Europe where you could get 35 years in prison for doing what Aaron did, not even remotely.
As a rule of thumb, divide the maximum US sentence in a case by ten and your closer to the standardso of the rest of the world.
35 years was the maximum he could be sentenced to, that doesn't mean he was going to get it.
Nevertheless, despite of all the respect I have in general for the USA, a country in which someone could get 35 years in prison for downloading scientific articles seems hardly civilized to me. It's barbaric. US lawmakers would be well advised to take a look at the rest of the industrialized, democratic first world countries from time to time and check what's considered adequate there. In some domains the discrepancy has become huge.
Whats even worse about this whole sad story is that (i) it is common among scientists to request articles from public mailing lists and from friends when you cannot access them and that (ii) it is a crucial part of scientific method to be open so people can scrutinize conjectures and results.
Are you serious?
You write as if some new method had been invented. There is no news in the above article. Authorship identification has been a reliable tool for many decades, a whole branch of linguistics (forensic linguistics) deals with it and similar topics like dialect recognition. Under certain circumstances you can even identify personality treats of the author, check out content analysis software like LIWC for example.
And, yes, plenty of serial killers and blackmailers have been captured with the help of these methods.
However, it hasn't been tested yet because no responsible emacs user uses a cell phone (because it can track you). Nevertheless, cell-phone.el works just fine if you configure and patch it correctly.
I've never been to any amusement park so I can't tell whether they are actually fun and worth it, but whenever I hear of one I'm thinking of Westworld with Yul Brynner. Oh, and by the way, whenever someone mentions McDonalds or a circus, It comes to my mind.
Needless to say I avoid amusement parks and McDonalds.
For general interest, here are the figures:
poverty under purchase power parity
That $1.25 is adjusted for purchasing power.
I doubt that, but anyway you should have said so from the start. Giving us the source of your figures wouldn't have harmed either.
In other words, other people arent the idiots you think that they are just because what they are telling you doesnt jive with the shit that you yourself cannot back up with facts.
I generally don't think other people are idiots but regarding you I am willing to make an exception.
By the way, measures of poverty have nothing to do with ones world view.
Poor is relative. On a global scale, nobody at all in the United States is poor.
It's not clear what point you're trying to make, because you seem to be contradicting yourself. Poverty is always relative. If you want to compare levels of poverty you cannot take into account values like "32.7% of Indians live on less then $1.25 per day" but need to consider the goods people can actually buy for the given amount of money in their country.
People who are about to starve to death in the US might fare well with the same amount of money in some rural part of India and, vice versa, an amount of money that might allow you to survive without problems in some part of the world would not allow you to survive at all in the US without the help of some charity. Such comparisons are completely pointless, because people have to survive where they are living, of course.
Back when I had a ZX-81 I regularly visited the home computer department of our local warehouse in the early eighties to take a look at better machines. One of the screens on some Atari said "Do not press a key". I pressed a key, of course, and the Atari imitated a very loud burglar alarm siren. You couldn't even stop it by pushing the reset button. :-)
Anyway, back to the topic. The wikipedia page on "killer pokes" doesn't mention the TI 99/4A but I remember the rumor that it could easily be destroyed by software. Is that true?