The crucial thing some people here seem to neglect is whether someone has been murdered in the first place. Sure looking up murder methods on the net is not very relevant if there is no dead body anywhere, but in this case his wife was found dead, he had a motive, and he had looked up the murder method just before. Of course, the search history is a piece of circumstantial evidence!
I'm a bit amazed that it took 10 years to convict this guy, but anyway it seems the police did a good job. Now why did this story appear on Slashdot?
Part of the reason the patent system is broken is there is a huge misconception among people about what a patent is and isn't.
I disagree, the patent system is broken because the patent evaluators have no clue about prior art and far too lax criteria for what counts as a specific implementation. That's why there are ridiculous yet valid patents for things like using windows as GUI elements or electronically serving structured documents from a remote server.
Naive as I sometimes am I used to believe that major credit card companies like Visa or Mastercard are obliged to process transactions, unless there is no well-defined court ruling against it, and cannot just refuse to deliver their services whenever they feel like it or are under political pressure. Personally, I don't give a damn about the cables and don't understand why the US government makes such a fuzz about them -- most of what they contain is known by everyone, and besides, personal assessments by diplomats are not facts anyway.
But it is astonishing and came as quite a surprise to me that essential economic services like money transfers and payment processing sites are apparently allowed to be operated by private companies in an arbitrary and unreliable way and can easily be influenced by governments to their will without legal consequences. I'd say there is an urgent need for neutrality rules in the form of laws and binding international treaties.
You're not quite right, though, because for example in my installation of Ubuntu the home directory and everything else needed is backed up automatically by Jungledisk (basically a point and click installation and setup). If my machine fails, I can get a new one, install Ubuntu on it, restore, and that's it.
Sure, restoring might take a bit longer than logging into the "Google cloud", but in turn my data is encrypted, I have full control over it, and I can always access and work on it no matter whether my Internet connection is down or not.
People shouldn't even use proprietary data formats if they want to be able to access their data in 10 or 20 years from now, so I can't understand why anybody would want to give his data without strong encryption to a private company that stores it in any way they like without any kind of data integrity guarantees. You don't have to be Richard Stallman in order to see that this is a recipe for disaster.
I can guarantee you that I will have absolutely no interest in "Chrome OS" but would be willing to buy a cheap netbook from Google -- as long as I can put a decent operating system on it. There is nothing wrong with this and it's an important and valuable service to the community when testers check whether alternative operating systems can be installed on the hardware running Google's latest attempt to do take away their users' control over their own data.
...Google can also automatically write my papers like my customized version of Emacs does, I'll stick to using my own web search engine based on support vector machine hooked up to a quick and dirty CommonLisp-based webcrawler.
Not only that, OpenLeaks agenda is naiv and even dangerous. By only providing information to a bunch of selected people they both endanger these people, i.e. the journalists they send the information to, and their own lives. Moreover, they are more prone to being undermined by intelligence agencies, who are specialized in manipulating and undermining small groups of people that have secrets.
Journalists are also just human beings, they are as susceptible to bribes or blackmailing as anybody else. When a leak is really explosive you need to get it as public as possible as soon as possible (to protect yourself, the source, and the other media representatives involved). Everything else is bound to be a disaster in the long run.
In a nutshell, Wikileaks essentially does it the right way---except that they should perhaps have chosen a better front man, some elder novelist or accredited journalist, instead of Assange.
Out of curiosity, what do they mean by "shutting down" websites? Remove domain names from DNS servers or really shutting down the physical servers? As far as I can see so far they have primarily fooled around with the international DNS system. If it's just that, who cares.
Yes, it's always dangerous to do business with large companies like Amazon or Paypal that aggressively try to obtain a monopoly in their market, because these kind of companies usually give a shit about individual customers. For my shareware I've been using Kagi from the start and never had any problem with them.
But I must confess that I'm still using Amazon S3 for my backups. (I wonder what happens if I upload a copy of the cable leaks in unencrypted form? Will my account be canceled without prior notice and all my backups be gone?)
Question: Can anyone recommend a reasonably prized alternative to the S3/Jungledisk combo?
Here is my interpretation of the recent events: The rape accusations occurred exactly at the time when Assange was contemplating to become a Swedish citizen so he would fall under the strong Swedish press protection laws. Like him I'm pretty convinced that this was a deliberate trap, it's just too much of a coincidence. It's a standard smear campaign that always works, it even has a psychological effect in people that don't really believe it--spreading doubts.That these accusations were upheld might or might not be due to political pressure by the US; it could also be that the prosecutor wants to show to the Swedish public that everyone is prosecuted no matter how prominent he is. The Interpol request is highly unusual, perhaps even illegal, and definitely based on immense pressure by the US.
My prediction is that someone will find some way to interrogate and later perhaps briefly arrest Assange in some country, be it Sweden or the UK or elsewhere. When this happens there will be a request for extradiction by the US for crimes such as high treason, espionage, computer security fraud, etc. and there will be immense pressure on the country to hand him over to the US authorities. It's pretty likely that the US authorities know exactly where Assange is, but the plan is to portray him as a criminal and persecute him through "official" means in order to make the whole character assassination and subsequent sentencing to a long-time prison term look like a democratic and ordinary justice procedure.
How about this: Use random numbers as names and translate them to IP addresses. Then let end users translate from names of their choice to such a number. So e.g. you visit site 16252672 and if you want, you can tell your browser to know it by the name of "Apple" -- or "expensive crap", just as you like. The browser translates "expensive crap" to 16252672 and a DNS server translates 16252672 to 17.149.160.49.
I would much prefer this system over the one we have now.
I know it's bad manners to reply to your own post, but since my original post is rated flamebait even though it was meant completely seriously I'd really like to know now from someone here why people hate spam so much. I'm getting perhaps 20-100 spam mails a day and never had any problems with them, they are filtered out very neatly by my spam filter. Some of these mails are even funny and the viruses they contain never work on my old Mac or on my linux box. That people can go to prison for sending spam is beyond my comprehension ever since the corresponding laws were invented.
What's so wrong with spam? Bandwith usage? By that token, anyone who ever used bittorrent would need to go to prison for 180 years. Oh well, there goes my karma...;-)
Sounds like a way too harsh sentence to me. Anyway, I personally like spam (and get lots of it). My email program filters out all of it, but sometimes I read it for entertainment. I don't know what's wrong with those annoying anti-spam fascists, perhaps they need to get laid more often.
The other people that have replied should study more history. After 1990, when lots of formerly classified information became available, it became clear that East and West never planned a first strike and the whole cold war was based on paranoia and misjudgment of the other side's motives. The incapability of both sides to correctly assess their opponent's motives almost lead to the complete destruction of the world when a NATO maneuver was misinterpreted as the preparation for a first strike in 1983. At all times after 1945 neither USA nor USSR intended to do a first strike, yet both sides believed the others were planning for it.
The OP is completely right, had they talked more the cold war would have been less dangerous and some of the more evil aspects of it could have been prevented. That's the historic reality and has nothing to do with the fact that Stalin was a mass murderer and not the brightest mind either.
(Or do the other posters suggest that the US should have nuked the USSR in a first strike because Stalin was such a bad guy?)
Why was the above post rated funny? The OP is right. In retrospective it turned out that the USSR never intended to attack the US and that the "domino" theory which lead to proxy wars and support for atrocial dictatorships was based on a misjudgment of Soviet foreign policies. Basically, both sides were completely paranoid and built up their nuclear arsenal because they were convinced that the other side was planning a first strike, although neither of the side ever planned a first strike. This went so far as to the 1983 incident, where a joint NATO maneuver was interpreted by a vast array of Russian intelligence sources as the preparation for a massive scale nuclear attack by NATO. Oh, and let's not forget that China, who was always considered an ally by the West, was always considered a rival by the USSR.
The bottomline is: While there were insurmountable ideological differences between the East and West, most of the cold war was caused by misinterpretation of the motives of the other side and by the fact that on both sides politicians based their decisions on utterly distorted informations from the military/intelligence complex.
In future, better not do anything suspicious like clicking on the wrong links or visit a website in an unusual order! Because that might get you killed by an unmanned aerial vehicle... However, no need to worry about the government. As long as you do exactly the same as everybody else, you're completely safe.
If 95% of the people who bought the game complete the first level (as tracked by developers through achievement systems) but only, say, 35-40% finish the game, that necessarily influences how you invest your limited development funds.
What I find bizarre is that the companies don't seem to take into account that if only 35-40% finish the game 60-65% didn't like the game enough to play it through -- which, one might think, indicates that they didn't really like it. Given that the last impression is usually the one that lasts it is only a matter of time until this will impact sales.
Sorry to be so negative but in my opinion the article is horrible. It doesn't explain anything unless you think bad analogies and jovial metaphors help you understand things better. After having read it, I don't know a single qubit more about quantum computers than before.
Slashdot Mirror
'Cos I hate it when a can't type on my Unicomp Spacesaver keyboard. :p
Why is this elderly CNN moderator shouting all the time? Or am I too sensitive and its just the normal way they talk at CNN HQ? Just curious...
The crucial thing some people here seem to neglect is whether someone has been murdered in the first place. Sure looking up murder methods on the net is not very relevant if there is no dead body anywhere, but in this case his wife was found dead, he had a motive, and he had looked up the murder method just before. Of course, the search history is a piece of circumstantial evidence!
I'm a bit amazed that it took 10 years to convict this guy, but anyway it seems the police did a good job. Now why did this story appear on Slashdot?
Part of the reason the patent system is broken is there is a huge misconception among people about what a patent is and isn't.
I disagree, the patent system is broken because the patent evaluators have no clue about prior art and far too lax criteria for what counts as a specific implementation. That's why there are ridiculous yet valid patents for things like using windows as GUI elements or electronically serving structured documents from a remote server.
Naive as I sometimes am I used to believe that major credit card companies like Visa or Mastercard are obliged to process transactions, unless there is no well-defined court ruling against it, and cannot just refuse to deliver their services whenever they feel like it or are under political pressure. Personally, I don't give a damn about the cables and don't understand why the US government makes such a fuzz about them -- most of what they contain is known by everyone, and besides, personal assessments by diplomats are not facts anyway.
But it is astonishing and came as quite a surprise to me that essential economic services like money transfers and payment processing sites are apparently allowed to be operated by private companies in an arbitrary and unreliable way and can easily be influenced by governments to their will without legal consequences. I'd say there is an urgent need for neutrality rules in the form of laws and binding international treaties.
[citation needed]
You're not quite right, though, because for example in my installation of Ubuntu the home directory and everything else needed is backed up automatically by Jungledisk (basically a point and click installation and setup). If my machine fails, I can get a new one, install Ubuntu on it, restore, and that's it.
Sure, restoring might take a bit longer than logging into the "Google cloud", but in turn my data is encrypted, I have full control over it, and I can always access and work on it no matter whether my Internet connection is down or not.
People shouldn't even use proprietary data formats if they want to be able to access their data in 10 or 20 years from now, so I can't understand why anybody would want to give his data without strong encryption to a private company that stores it in any way they like without any kind of data integrity guarantees. You don't have to be Richard Stallman in order to see that this is a recipe for disaster.
I can guarantee you that I will have absolutely no interest in "Chrome OS" but would be willing to buy a cheap netbook from Google -- as long as I can put a decent operating system on it. There is nothing wrong with this and it's an important and valuable service to the community when testers check whether alternative operating systems can be installed on the hardware running Google's latest attempt to do take away their users' control over their own data.
...Google can also automatically write my papers like my customized version of Emacs does, I'll stick to using my own web search engine based on support vector machine hooked up to a quick and dirty CommonLisp-based webcrawler.
Not only that, OpenLeaks agenda is naiv and even dangerous. By only providing information to a bunch of selected people they both endanger these people, i.e. the journalists they send the information to, and their own lives. Moreover, they are more prone to being undermined by intelligence agencies, who are specialized in manipulating and undermining small groups of people that have secrets.
Journalists are also just human beings, they are as susceptible to bribes or blackmailing as anybody else. When a leak is really explosive you need to get it as public as possible as soon as possible (to protect yourself, the source, and the other media representatives involved). Everything else is bound to be a disaster in the long run.
In a nutshell, Wikileaks essentially does it the right way---except that they should perhaps have chosen a better front man, some elder novelist or accredited journalist, instead of Assange.
Out of curiosity, what do they mean by "shutting down" websites? Remove domain names from DNS servers or really shutting down the physical servers? As far as I can see so far they have primarily fooled around with the international DNS system. If it's just that, who cares.
Yes, it's always dangerous to do business with large companies like Amazon or Paypal that aggressively try to obtain a monopoly in their market, because these kind of companies usually give a shit about individual customers. For my shareware I've been using Kagi from the start and never had any problem with them.
But I must confess that I'm still using Amazon S3 for my backups. (I wonder what happens if I upload a copy of the cable leaks in unencrypted form? Will my account be canceled without prior notice and all my backups be gone?)
Question: Can anyone recommend a reasonably prized alternative to the S3/Jungledisk combo?
I think you've confused Interpol with the German "Bundesnachrichtendienst" (Organisation Gehlen).
Here is my interpretation of the recent events: The rape accusations occurred exactly at the time when Assange was contemplating to become a Swedish citizen so he would fall under the strong Swedish press protection laws. Like him I'm pretty convinced that this was a deliberate trap, it's just too much of a coincidence. It's a standard smear campaign that always works, it even has a psychological effect in people that don't really believe it--spreading doubts.That these accusations were upheld might or might not be due to political pressure by the US; it could also be that the prosecutor wants to show to the Swedish public that everyone is prosecuted no matter how prominent he is. The Interpol request is highly unusual, perhaps even illegal, and definitely based on immense pressure by the US.
My prediction is that someone will find some way to interrogate and later perhaps briefly arrest Assange in some country, be it Sweden or the UK or elsewhere. When this happens there will be a request for extradiction by the US for crimes such as high treason, espionage, computer security fraud, etc. and there will be immense pressure on the country to hand him over to the US authorities. It's pretty likely that the US authorities know exactly where Assange is, but the plan is to portray him as a criminal and persecute him through "official" means in order to make the whole character assassination and subsequent sentencing to a long-time prison term look like a democratic and ordinary justice procedure.
That's all, of course, just speculation...
How about this: Use random numbers as names and translate them to IP addresses. Then let end users translate from names of their choice to such a number. So e.g. you visit site 16252672 and if you want, you can tell your browser to know it by the name of "Apple" -- or "expensive crap", just as you like. The browser translates "expensive crap" to 16252672 and a DNS server translates 16252672 to 17.149.160.49.
I would much prefer this system over the one we have now.
I know it's bad manners to reply to your own post, but since my original post is rated flamebait even though it was meant completely seriously I'd really like to know now from someone here why people hate spam so much. I'm getting perhaps 20-100 spam mails a day and never had any problems with them, they are filtered out very neatly by my spam filter. Some of these mails are even funny and the viruses they contain never work on my old Mac or on my linux box. That people can go to prison for sending spam is beyond my comprehension ever since the corresponding laws were invented.
What's so wrong with spam? Bandwith usage? By that token, anyone who ever used bittorrent would need to go to prison for 180 years. Oh well, there goes my karma... ;-)
Sounds like a way too harsh sentence to me. Anyway, I personally like spam (and get lots of it). My email program filters out all of it, but sometimes I read it for entertainment. I don't know what's wrong with those annoying anti-spam fascists, perhaps they need to get laid more often.
NSA's work on secure systems? Let me guess, you where referring to the clipper chip.
It's just a small step from downloading a Harry Potter movie to building nuclear weapon's and selling them to Iran, I guess.
The other people that have replied should study more history. After 1990, when lots of formerly classified information became available, it became clear that East and West never planned a first strike and the whole cold war was based on paranoia and misjudgment of the other side's motives. The incapability of both sides to correctly assess their opponent's motives almost lead to the complete destruction of the world when a NATO maneuver was misinterpreted as the preparation for a first strike in 1983. At all times after 1945 neither USA nor USSR intended to do a first strike, yet both sides believed the others were planning for it.
The OP is completely right, had they talked more the cold war would have been less dangerous and some of the more evil aspects of it could have been prevented. That's the historic reality and has nothing to do with the fact that Stalin was a mass murderer and not the brightest mind either.
(Or do the other posters suggest that the US should have nuked the USSR in a first strike because Stalin was such a bad guy?)
Why was the above post rated funny? The OP is right. In retrospective it turned out that the USSR never intended to attack the US and that the "domino" theory which lead to proxy wars and support for atrocial dictatorships was based on a misjudgment of Soviet foreign policies. Basically, both sides were completely paranoid and built up their nuclear arsenal because they were convinced that the other side was planning a first strike, although neither of the side ever planned a first strike. This went so far as to the 1983 incident, where a joint NATO maneuver was interpreted by a vast array of Russian intelligence sources as the preparation for a massive scale nuclear attack by NATO. Oh, and let's not forget that China, who was always considered an ally by the West, was always considered a rival by the USSR.
The bottomline is: While there were insurmountable ideological differences between the East and West, most of the cold war was caused by misinterpretation of the motives of the other side and by the fact that on both sides politicians based their decisions on utterly distorted informations from the military/intelligence complex.
In future, better not do anything suspicious like clicking on the wrong links or visit a website in an unusual order! Because that might get you killed by an unmanned aerial vehicle... However, no need to worry about the government. As long as you do exactly the same as everybody else, you're completely safe.
If 95% of the people who bought the game complete the first level (as tracked by developers through achievement systems) but only, say, 35-40% finish the game, that necessarily influences how you invest your limited development funds.
What I find bizarre is that the companies don't seem to take into account that if only 35-40% finish the game 60-65% didn't like the game enough to play it through -- which, one might think, indicates that they didn't really like it. Given that the last impression is usually the one that lasts it is only a matter of time until this will impact sales.
Sorry to be so negative but in my opinion the article is horrible. It doesn't explain anything unless you think bad analogies and jovial metaphors help you understand things better. After having read it, I don't know a single qubit more about quantum computers than before.
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