Um, no. In his editorial (there's no other word for it really), he specifically mentions similar functionality available from TrueCrypt. That is, the ability to host two (or more) encrypted volumes, one with stuff that you might want to hide but that isn't illegal and one with stuff that is illegal that you really want to hide.
The true thrust of his article is that just having TrueCrypt (or any other advanced encryption tool) installed on your machine is enough to pique the interest of law enforcement. If just having encryption installed on the PC is enough to lose privacy and invite harassment, then TrueCrypt and the like create a different problem from the one they solve. Ideally, the author argues, it would be best if everyone had strong encryption on their machines, as part of the OS or as part of some other common piece of software. This way, the police would see nothing out of the ordinary when they see the encryption software, because everyone has it.
If you're arguing that the law is pointless because it allows criminals to keep their mouth shut and avoid some prison time, you're wrong.
Without the law the criminals would be off scott free if the don't share the password. With the law, the criminals are guaranteed a certain amount of prison time for refusing to give the password and still run the risk of being convicted of whatever the police are accusing them of. For example, if the police think some guy has kiddie porn but he won't give his encryption password, not only will he be convicted for not handing over the password he may also still be convictable for kiddie porn based on other evidence (ISP logs for example); especially with the circumstantial evidence that he won't give his password to exonerate himself (the law says that not giving a password is not covered by the UK equivalent to the 5th amendment).
Personally, I think it should be up to the police to be able to make their case without having access to the encryption password. That means getting a warrant and monitoring his internet connection, peering through his window with a telescope, even breaking down the door when it appears he is in the act of breaking the law. I don't understand why the police would want to rely on a single piece of evidence to make their entire case anyway.
Oh, and if you defend their position, you are ultimately working for their cause. Even if you're just stating their position (and thereby promote it).
No, that is not the way discourse works. Just because you don't agree with them, doesn't mean that no one should hear what they have to say. And don't go trying to twist my words around into something that you and I both no I don't mean. My point is that there is a time and a place for debate, attempting to silence or stifle one side of the debate, during that time, is not acceptable.
That doesn't mean that creationism should be taught in schools; it means that if someone on the board argues that it should be, then the board should debate the point and make a decision. Similarly, before the law is enacted, the public has the right to hear both sides of the story from people on both sides of the issue. Clarifying one side's argument, even the side you don't agree with, improves the quality of the debate and with it the quality of the decision; whether you agree with that decision or not.
The only reasoning that is used is "You liked [movie group A], other people who liked [movie group A] also like [movie B] so maybe you will too". There may be something in there to make the groupings by genre but I doubt it, when the first contest started Netflix reluctantly made genre information available after a couple teams asked for it.
Depending on what he's asking for, that isn't exactly fair either. You can buy individual copies of the WSJ for your Kindle, or you can by a yearly subscription upfront such that it is delivered to your Kindle automatically each day. As far as I'm concerned, asking for the contact information for the latter is reasonable, the former is not.
Look at what we have now - 'free' news sources that don't give us much news but give us a whole lotta opinion masquerading as news (blogs, anyone?).
Yes, whereas the news that we pay for (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc) is all 100% news, certainly no opinions or bias there. Seriously, until I hit the parentheses, I honest to God thought that those were the news outlets you were talking about. More than 90% of what most people would call 'real news' is opinion at best, political hatchet jobs at worst.
I will agree, however, that it is unlikely that a free, unbiased news source will pop up any time soon on its own. The people who care enough about getting news to others are the same ones with strong opinions that will inevitably filter into their reporting. Maybe if we get a publicly funded news organization similar to the BBC, but even that is vulnerable to bias since the money will be coming from whomever is in control of the budget at the moment.
Maybe not an 'explosive' level of improvement, but there certainly go exist drugs that improve cognitive abilities. The lump of squishy grey meat in our heads is arguably the most complex thing we have come across in our search of the cosmos. It has been studied for hundreds of years by thousands of people, but today we have tools and models that are beginning to make real progress. If we don't see anything significant come out of neuroscience within the next 50 years, I'll concede that maybe you are right, and we just don't know enough. But I'll be amazed if I need to make that concession.
I'm not sure why you are modded troll however. The question of whether there is a difference between what our brains do and what a microchip does is largely philosophical at this point. We don't have nearly enough information to say one way or the other if it is true or not. If we end up simulating a brain 200 years from now by modeling every single atom in it, to me that is a failure, even if it does end at the same state.
I hereby propose, adblock minus. An adblocker that only blocks annoying adds; where annoying is anything that blinks, changes size to cover the rest of the page, pops up/under, uses flash in general, makes up a significant portion of the page's data (>10%?), or wants me to 'spank the monkey' or something similar.
I know you're joking, but Twitter does have a nearly unique architecture that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to block without blocking the entire Internet. Now, say what you will about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of using it as a protest or organization tool, but at least it keeps the lines of communication open in spite of government interference.
The short answer is that building a spacecraft to orbit and come back is 100% equivalent to building an ICBM. How many average joes in the US do you think would be willing to sell that information to anyone who asks? I know it's not ideal, but I really would prefer if countries like North Korea and Iran don't have that kind of technology.
Somehow, I always find it amazing the things we don't know about. We know the makeup of the universe down to a couple of percentage points. We know what subatomic particles do what, and have theories to predict other ones that have virtually no effect on our universe. We know when the sun is going to run out of fuel and have pretty accurate theories about what will happen to the solar system when that happens.
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
Well, from the technology side what I would consider interesting is that this is essentially an Earthquake bomb. The damage is caused by shock waves through the ground rather than through the air, allowing it to damage bunkers over a very large area. It's entirely possible that this bomb will destroy facilities that would be nearly untouched by a nuclear weapon.
Also interesting, though from a sociopolitical side, this is a bomb with a single military purpose and that is to threaten/destroy the infrastructure needed to produce a nuclear bomb, specifically in countries that are trying to hide or protect those facilities (read: North Korea and Iran). Those are the only targets large enough and valuable enough for the complexity of this weapon to make sense.
However I never liked that book--its was boring and the main character is a total sap.
This may sound strange, but I think you could argue that Winston being a sap is important to understanding at least one theme of the book. At the beginning, the main character is a total tool, doesn't think through his decisions, doesn't care about anything, hates his life, and has zero ambition. As long as he has his "victory gin" he's pretty much as satisfied as he's going to get. None of that is surprising given the setting, but what should be surprising is that it is him who tries to join/start the revolution. If he, of all people, is is one of the very rare rebels, think how low the rest of the population must be.
The idea is that the probe would stick around at least long enough to build a few copies of itself, it's the only reasonable way to produce the number of probes needed to scout the entire galaxy and also has the advantage of each probe having to travel a relatively short distance before it is replaced.
The assumption is, if you're already building copies, why not leave some behind to keep an eye on things. After all, it's going to take millions of years to get the results back anyway, a lot can change in that amount of time. And if you can build perfect copies from locally available materials, there's no real reason that they can't last nearly forever. Have a dozen spares spread throughout the system and when one starts failing start building a replacement.
Obviously a ton of assumptions, but I think if humans were trying to explore the whole galaxy with probes, that is the way we would do it.
I'd like to sell you a car, it's brand new and gets great gas mileage. Oh, but only you can drive it, no fair letting someone else borrow it without them paying us. And you can only drive it on roads that we say are ok. You also have to bring it in to the shop once a week, or it will stop working. If you're out of town and can't get it into the shop, it'll stop working until you do, and if the shop goes out of business or just doesn't want to work on your car anymore, well, that's just too bad; we reject the idea that you should be able to drive your car forever.
I'm sorry, but giving advanced military technology to the Pakistani government while said government is bordering on unstable would be mind numbingly stupid. If the Pakistani government were to fail, there is no telling what kind of government will replace it. The US government isn't quite stupid enough to take that risk, maybe they've temporarily learned their lesson now that they have to worry about F14s in Iran and Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. No, that that level of military technology should be given only to our closest and most stable allies.
The issue isn't the P2P per say, it's the fact that many P2P programs make it easy to accidentally mark files for uploading that you don't mean to. A lazy/stupid/uninformed user stands a decent chance of sharing information without even realizing it, I remember trying to explain that to someone in my family way back when Napster was big, that they were sharing all of their documents out over the network because that is where they happened to store their downloaded files and they had marked the folder as one to share, not realizing that it would share files other than those they had downloaded.
Any program that can upload user documents without the user having knowledge of it shouldn't be used on any kind of sensitive system. In my mind, bit torrent is relatively safe from this, since it requires the user to create a torrent and make it available, not the kind of thing that is going to happen accidentally.
We like the theories because no one has come up with anything better and they have made successful predictions that have been verified as our technology improves. Look at the COBE mission, designed to chart the energy of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Before it was launched predictions were made about what would be seen, predictions based upon Big Bang Cosmology (specifically, that the universe used to be really, really hot), as it turns out, the data gathered by COBE agreed precisely.
What about nature is cyclical and eternal exactly? The earth will eventually crash into the sun, the sun will eventually burn itself out, the galaxy itself will run out of fusible material eventually. In a closed system, entropy will always win, once energy has been lost to heat (entropy) you cannot get it back in a closed system. Unless you're arguing that the universe isn't a closed system, that energy and matter are constantly being supplied somehow, an eternal universe doesn't work. And if energy and mass is coming from somewhere, then this universe, by definition, isn't the whole universe.
Most people/companies are not interested in the new features offered by Vista. They just aren't that compelling
Most people anyway, have never sat down in front of a Vista machine for long enough to get used to it.
Compatibility, seriously? That hasn't been a problem for literally years. Any computer you buy off the shelf today is going to have compatible hardware and I bet you'd be hard pressed to find individual pieces that are worth buying that aren't compatible.
UAC? Can be turned off in about 5 mouse clicks.
I can't say much about performance except that my $600 laptop has enough power to handle it easily, I know that doesn't capture the netbook market at all, but if you're buying an off the shelf desktop or laptop I highly doubt you'll see any issues. It's true that there isn't a whole lot of big changes to make the transition worthwhile, certainly there's nothing that would make me upgrade an XP machine to Vista.
OTOH, if I were buying a new machine and had the choice, I would, in all honesty, take Vista for the little things if nothing else. Being able to control the volume on a program by program basis is very nice. Being able to search the start bar and individual folders, including things like the control panel is also nice, just to name a couple. The single largest problem with Vista was it's launch, for what it's worth running Vista is actually quite enjoyable for me.
(Please don't blow this post off just because it's not anti-Vista, I run XP at work, Vista on my laptop, and Ubuntu on my Desktop. All have the pluses and minuses, I'm just trying to dispel a bit of the bad reputation that Vista (unfairly IMO) has.)
Seriously, if they're going to do research based purely on computer simulations, the least they could do is release the source code of the simulation. If we're going to call these studies science, think how much science would be done if everyone had access and could edit the tools used in the study.
Since the researches specifically said that the drivers followed the rules I took clumping to mean the kind caused by the guy going 66 trying to pass the guy going 65. The good old rolling road block that I see every time I go on long trips. If that's the case, rather than having rule breakers, I'd be curious what the effects would be to have every driver that is currently passing someone go at least 10 mph more than the person they are passing.
Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. If you start talking about guaranteed rights, inevitably there will be times when one person's rights are in conflict with another's. In this case, it is your right to free speech verses another person's (or entity's) right to protect their way of life.
Our law system has decided that if you are telling the truth, you can say whatever you want and they can't do anything about it. In fact, if you even think you are telling the truth when you say it, they can't do anything about it. But, if you're spreading lies and misinformation for the sole purpose of hurting someone else's business or reputation, their right to a fair reputation is stronger than your right to attack them. Imagine if it wasn't; you'd have ads for Colgate that say "Crest causes cancer" and ads for Crest that say "Colgate is made from the bones of unborn babies" and there would be nothing either side could do about it.
It's a shame that Randi is as intelligent as he is, for a moment there I was thinking I could get away with something along the lines of "I have the ability to detect EM radiation in the 380-750 nm wavelength range using my unaided eye". I wonder how far from the visible spectrum you have to be to qualify, I thought I remember reading something about being able to see infrared if you ate a modified version of some vitamin; can't seem to find the link now so I might just be crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no. In his editorial (there's no other word for it really), he specifically mentions similar functionality available from TrueCrypt. That is, the ability to host two (or more) encrypted volumes, one with stuff that you might want to hide but that isn't illegal and one with stuff that is illegal that you really want to hide.
The true thrust of his article is that just having TrueCrypt (or any other advanced encryption tool) installed on your machine is enough to pique the interest of law enforcement. If just having encryption installed on the PC is enough to lose privacy and invite harassment, then TrueCrypt and the like create a different problem from the one they solve. Ideally, the author argues, it would be best if everyone had strong encryption on their machines, as part of the OS or as part of some other common piece of software. This way, the police would see nothing out of the ordinary when they see the encryption software, because everyone has it.
If you're arguing that the law is pointless because it allows criminals to keep their mouth shut and avoid some prison time, you're wrong.
Without the law the criminals would be off scott free if the don't share the password. With the law, the criminals are guaranteed a certain amount of prison time for refusing to give the password and still run the risk of being convicted of whatever the police are accusing them of. For example, if the police think some guy has kiddie porn but he won't give his encryption password, not only will he be convicted for not handing over the password he may also still be convictable for kiddie porn based on other evidence (ISP logs for example); especially with the circumstantial evidence that he won't give his password to exonerate himself (the law says that not giving a password is not covered by the UK equivalent to the 5th amendment).
Personally, I think it should be up to the police to be able to make their case without having access to the encryption password. That means getting a warrant and monitoring his internet connection, peering through his window with a telescope, even breaking down the door when it appears he is in the act of breaking the law. I don't understand why the police would want to rely on a single piece of evidence to make their entire case anyway.
Oh, and if you defend their position, you are ultimately working for their cause. Even if you're just stating their position (and thereby promote it).
No, that is not the way discourse works. Just because you don't agree with them, doesn't mean that no one should hear what they have to say. And don't go trying to twist my words around into something that you and I both no I don't mean. My point is that there is a time and a place for debate, attempting to silence or stifle one side of the debate, during that time, is not acceptable.
That doesn't mean that creationism should be taught in schools; it means that if someone on the board argues that it should be, then the board should debate the point and make a decision. Similarly, before the law is enacted, the public has the right to hear both sides of the story from people on both sides of the issue. Clarifying one side's argument, even the side you don't agree with, improves the quality of the debate and with it the quality of the decision; whether you agree with that decision or not.
The only reasoning that is used is "You liked [movie group A], other people who liked [movie group A] also like [movie B] so maybe you will too". There may be something in there to make the groupings by genre but I doubt it, when the first contest started Netflix reluctantly made genre information available after a couple teams asked for it.
Depending on what he's asking for, that isn't exactly fair either. You can buy individual copies of the WSJ for your Kindle, or you can by a yearly subscription upfront such that it is delivered to your Kindle automatically each day. As far as I'm concerned, asking for the contact information for the latter is reasonable, the former is not.
Look at what we have now - 'free' news sources that don't give us much news but give us a whole lotta opinion masquerading as news (blogs, anyone?).
Yes, whereas the news that we pay for (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc) is all 100% news, certainly no opinions or bias there. Seriously, until I hit the parentheses, I honest to God thought that those were the news outlets you were talking about. More than 90% of what most people would call 'real news' is opinion at best, political hatchet jobs at worst.
I will agree, however, that it is unlikely that a free, unbiased news source will pop up any time soon on its own. The people who care enough about getting news to others are the same ones with strong opinions that will inevitably filter into their reporting. Maybe if we get a publicly funded news organization similar to the BBC, but even that is vulnerable to bias since the money will be coming from whomever is in control of the budget at the moment.
Humanity has not yet designed a smarter human.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropics
Maybe not an 'explosive' level of improvement, but there certainly go exist drugs that improve cognitive abilities. The lump of squishy grey meat in our heads is arguably the most complex thing we have come across in our search of the cosmos. It has been studied for hundreds of years by thousands of people, but today we have tools and models that are beginning to make real progress. If we don't see anything significant come out of neuroscience within the next 50 years, I'll concede that maybe you are right, and we just don't know enough. But I'll be amazed if I need to make that concession.
I'm not sure why you are modded troll however. The question of whether there is a difference between what our brains do and what a microchip does is largely philosophical at this point. We don't have nearly enough information to say one way or the other if it is true or not. If we end up simulating a brain 200 years from now by modeling every single atom in it, to me that is a failure, even if it does end at the same state.
I hereby propose, adblock minus. An adblocker that only blocks annoying adds; where annoying is anything that blinks, changes size to cover the rest of the page, pops up/under, uses flash in general, makes up a significant portion of the page's data (>10%?), or wants me to 'spank the monkey' or something similar.
I know you're joking, but Twitter does have a nearly unique architecture that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to block without blocking the entire Internet. Now, say what you will about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of using it as a protest or organization tool, but at least it keeps the lines of communication open in spite of government interference.
The short answer is that building a spacecraft to orbit and come back is 100% equivalent to building an ICBM. How many average joes in the US do you think would be willing to sell that information to anyone who asks? I know it's not ideal, but I really would prefer if countries like North Korea and Iran don't have that kind of technology.
Somehow, I always find it amazing the things we don't know about. We know the makeup of the universe down to a couple of percentage points. We know what subatomic particles do what, and have theories to predict other ones that have virtually no effect on our universe. We know when the sun is going to run out of fuel and have pretty accurate theories about what will happen to the solar system when that happens.
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
Well, from the technology side what I would consider interesting is that this is essentially an Earthquake bomb. The damage is caused by shock waves through the ground rather than through the air, allowing it to damage bunkers over a very large area. It's entirely possible that this bomb will destroy facilities that would be nearly untouched by a nuclear weapon.
Also interesting, though from a sociopolitical side, this is a bomb with a single military purpose and that is to threaten/destroy the infrastructure needed to produce a nuclear bomb, specifically in countries that are trying to hide or protect those facilities (read: North Korea and Iran). Those are the only targets large enough and valuable enough for the complexity of this weapon to make sense.
Actually, it's more like saying "Because I live within walking distance to work and walk to work, no one needs a car. At all. Ever."
However I never liked that book--its was boring and the main character is a total sap.
This may sound strange, but I think you could argue that Winston being a sap is important to understanding at least one theme of the book. At the beginning, the main character is a total tool, doesn't think through his decisions, doesn't care about anything, hates his life, and has zero ambition. As long as he has his "victory gin" he's pretty much as satisfied as he's going to get. None of that is surprising given the setting, but what should be surprising is that it is him who tries to join/start the revolution. If he, of all people, is is one of the very rare rebels, think how low the rest of the population must be.
The idea is that the probe would stick around at least long enough to build a few copies of itself, it's the only reasonable way to produce the number of probes needed to scout the entire galaxy and also has the advantage of each probe having to travel a relatively short distance before it is replaced.
The assumption is, if you're already building copies, why not leave some behind to keep an eye on things. After all, it's going to take millions of years to get the results back anyway, a lot can change in that amount of time. And if you can build perfect copies from locally available materials, there's no real reason that they can't last nearly forever. Have a dozen spares spread throughout the system and when one starts failing start building a replacement.
Obviously a ton of assumptions, but I think if humans were trying to explore the whole galaxy with probes, that is the way we would do it.
Car Analogy, I choose you!
I'd like to sell you a car, it's brand new and gets great gas mileage. Oh, but only you can drive it, no fair letting someone else borrow it without them paying us. And you can only drive it on roads that we say are ok. You also have to bring it in to the shop once a week, or it will stop working. If you're out of town and can't get it into the shop, it'll stop working until you do, and if the shop goes out of business or just doesn't want to work on your car anymore, well, that's just too bad; we reject the idea that you should be able to drive your car forever.
I'm sorry, but giving advanced military technology to the Pakistani government while said government is bordering on unstable would be mind numbingly stupid. If the Pakistani government were to fail, there is no telling what kind of government will replace it. The US government isn't quite stupid enough to take that risk, maybe they've temporarily learned their lesson now that they have to worry about F14s in Iran and Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. No, that that level of military technology should be given only to our closest and most stable allies.
The issue isn't the P2P per say, it's the fact that many P2P programs make it easy to accidentally mark files for uploading that you don't mean to. A lazy/stupid/uninformed user stands a decent chance of sharing information without even realizing it, I remember trying to explain that to someone in my family way back when Napster was big, that they were sharing all of their documents out over the network because that is where they happened to store their downloaded files and they had marked the folder as one to share, not realizing that it would share files other than those they had downloaded.
Any program that can upload user documents without the user having knowledge of it shouldn't be used on any kind of sensitive system. In my mind, bit torrent is relatively safe from this, since it requires the user to create a torrent and make it available, not the kind of thing that is going to happen accidentally.
We like the theories because no one has come up with anything better and they have made successful predictions that have been verified as our technology improves. Look at the COBE mission, designed to chart the energy of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Before it was launched predictions were made about what would be seen, predictions based upon Big Bang Cosmology (specifically, that the universe used to be really, really hot), as it turns out, the data gathered by COBE agreed precisely.
What about nature is cyclical and eternal exactly? The earth will eventually crash into the sun, the sun will eventually burn itself out, the galaxy itself will run out of fusible material eventually. In a closed system, entropy will always win, once energy has been lost to heat (entropy) you cannot get it back in a closed system. Unless you're arguing that the universe isn't a closed system, that energy and matter are constantly being supplied somehow, an eternal universe doesn't work. And if energy and mass is coming from somewhere, then this universe, by definition, isn't the whole universe.
Most people/companies are not interested in the new features offered by Vista. They just aren't that compelling
Most people anyway, have never sat down in front of a Vista machine for long enough to get used to it.
Compatibility, seriously? That hasn't been a problem for literally years. Any computer you buy off the shelf today is going to have compatible hardware and I bet you'd be hard pressed to find individual pieces that are worth buying that aren't compatible.
UAC? Can be turned off in about 5 mouse clicks.
I can't say much about performance except that my $600 laptop has enough power to handle it easily, I know that doesn't capture the netbook market at all, but if you're buying an off the shelf desktop or laptop I highly doubt you'll see any issues. It's true that there isn't a whole lot of big changes to make the transition worthwhile, certainly there's nothing that would make me upgrade an XP machine to Vista.
OTOH, if I were buying a new machine and had the choice, I would, in all honesty, take Vista for the little things if nothing else. Being able to control the volume on a program by program basis is very nice. Being able to search the start bar and individual folders, including things like the control panel is also nice, just to name a couple. The single largest problem with Vista was it's launch, for what it's worth running Vista is actually quite enjoyable for me.
(Please don't blow this post off just because it's not anti-Vista, I run XP at work, Vista on my laptop, and Ubuntu on my Desktop. All have the pluses and minuses, I'm just trying to dispel a bit of the bad reputation that Vista (unfairly IMO) has.)
Seriously, if they're going to do research based purely on computer simulations, the least they could do is release the source code of the simulation. If we're going to call these studies science, think how much science would be done if everyone had access and could edit the tools used in the study.
Since the researches specifically said that the drivers followed the rules I took clumping to mean the kind caused by the guy going 66 trying to pass the guy going 65. The good old rolling road block that I see every time I go on long trips. If that's the case, rather than having rule breakers, I'd be curious what the effects would be to have every driver that is currently passing someone go at least 10 mph more than the person they are passing.
Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. If you start talking about guaranteed rights, inevitably there will be times when one person's rights are in conflict with another's. In this case, it is your right to free speech verses another person's (or entity's) right to protect their way of life.
Our law system has decided that if you are telling the truth, you can say whatever you want and they can't do anything about it. In fact, if you even think you are telling the truth when you say it, they can't do anything about it. But, if you're spreading lies and misinformation for the sole purpose of hurting someone else's business or reputation, their right to a fair reputation is stronger than your right to attack them. Imagine if it wasn't; you'd have ads for Colgate that say "Crest causes cancer" and ads for Crest that say "Colgate is made from the bones of unborn babies" and there would be nothing either side could do about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_wave#Product
That wasn't so hard, now was it?
It's a shame that Randi is as intelligent as he is, for a moment there I was thinking I could get away with something along the lines of "I have the ability to detect EM radiation in the 380-750 nm wavelength range using my unaided eye". I wonder how far from the visible spectrum you have to be to qualify, I thought I remember reading something about being able to see infrared if you ate a modified version of some vitamin; can't seem to find the link now so I might just be crazy.