Without having read the actual scientific journal article (but just the very unscientific coverage of it), I have serious reservations about the study
That tells us everything we need to know. You're worried about something you neither have read nor understood, but you feel empowered to tell other people how bad it is despite your ignorance.
Don't you have the good sense to be ashamed of behaving this way?
Cell phone radiation is of sufficiently low energy that I am not sure it can even penetrate INTO the brain. I am not sure this has ever been conclusively shown.
Oh nonsense. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with particle physics knows perfectly well that if it can penetrate several dozen steel or wood walls, it can make it through half an inch of bone. If you don't believe me, find your nearest cell tower, stand between it and your phone, and see whether you get a signal. That said, that cellular radiation can penetrate into the brain has been extensively shown in other animals, so unless you want to pretend the human brain is somehow different, then the reason you aren't sure is because you've never checked. A display of ignorance is not an argument against.
The issue isn't whether it can penetrate. The issue is whether it will collide on the way through.
I am a radiation oncologist by trade.
I'm not sure I believe that someone who doesn't think cell radiation can get into a brain could possibly be a trained particle physician.
So I'm a little outside my training here.
Real radiation oncologists are required to understand particle physics and its interaction with organic tissue. Those physical systems are as valid at cellphone energies as they are at x-ray and gamma energies. You shouldn't be outside your training if you are who you claim to be.
However, even some of the treatments we use only penetrate a centimeter or less, and these are much higher energy than radiation from cell phones, as far as I know.
A real radiation oncologist would know that the primary determinant in depth of penetration is the wavelength of the radiation, not the energy, which is why you can operate your ridiculously high energy devices and get only an inch penetration, and yet why a microwave running on AC power can wholly cook things. This whole thing rings false: if you are who you claim you are, then you are dangerously ignorant of your own job, a job on which other people's lives depend. If you are who you claim you are, I very much hope you will attend new training.
This study appears, at first blush, to make the error of...
How would you know? You haven't even read it!... to make the error of assuming that association of two disparate events demonstrates cause and effect.
If you'd read it, you'd know it didn't make that error (it's called the fallacy of conjunction, which an educated person should also know.)
If the brain is more active, their study design fails to prove that it is due to the radiation.
It has no such failure, and if you'd bother to read something before you criticised it, you'd know that. Of course, as a purported doctor, you should also be familiar with single-blind testing, which is in what they engaged, and whose specific nature is to eliminate the problem you're pretending you saw in a document you admit you didn't see.
Maybe the brain becomes more excitable because the study subject just got a phone call from a friend or loved one?
The subjects weren't receiving calls. Read the paper before criticising obvious falsehoods.
It might be that the original article addresses some of these shortcomings.
I should hope that in the future you have the decency to not karma whore like this. This sort of nonsense grandstanding and ego-driven lying (yes, I'm calling you a liar - you're criticising something you've never read with things that are patently false, and feigning comprehension of things you obviously don't comprehend) is the primary basis of disinformation.
As a (supposed) doctor, you of all people should know how dangerous and unethical this is. You're lucky I don't know where you work.
We've been watching people talking to their passengers, even in the back seat, and turning around to listen to them.
Yeah, that's illegal too. Believe it or not, the law actually requires the driver to watch the road. Therefore, your example carries no contrarian weight; all you've done is to shore up that cellular during driving is a bad idea.
Some people can handle talking on the cellphone while driving
Studies show they can't. I had friends in college who would insist they could handle driving drunk, too. Several of them are now dead, and several more have been in serious accidents as a result. Just because you have managed to skate by and get lucky doesn't mean you can handle it.
That said, if that was the only problem, I'd say "hey, go nuts; if you're dumb enough to distract yourself in a ton of metal moving at 60 mph, I'd like you out of the gene pool." But, that's not the only problem. You're not just putting yourself at risk with your openly naïve insistance based on zero actual knowledge that what everyone around you has seen to cause fatalities is actually okay.
You're putting us at risk of death too, by your insistence on believing something that studies and experience show is just false. That is not acceptable.
I find it nothing short of amazing that you're willing to pretend to yourself that some people can handle it, after saying If we are realistic, we can't accept that, because we know it's not true. If you want other people to be reasonable and to take a handle on common knowledge, you'll need to do it too. Otherwise, you're just a hypocrite.
If you would advocate banning one thing, then you should advocate banning all these things, and only allowing passengers on public transportation. All other travel should be done using single-person vehicles.
By that same line of argument, coffee, beer and soda (and sugar water) should be outlawed because they have a psychoactive effect, and Absinthe is illegal. If you attempt to outlaw any of those three drinks, Slashdot will murder you.
What you're engaging in is a combination of unrepresentative sample and false dichotomy. You have posited the situation where if something is banned, everything else which could have any similar description should also be banned. This is absurd: things aren't black and white. That's why we can ban pornography from broadcast television but still let them show soap operas and NYPD blue. This is why we can ban "fuck" from the broadcast airwaves, but let people get away with "damn" and "darn." This is why people can smoke cigarettes but not heroin. This is why people can have pistols but not rocket launchers. This is why we require helmets on motorcycles, but not plate mail.
Furthermore, though, the idea that talking
It comes with no cupholders, ostensibly because they want you to think about driving, and not drinking something.
Ostensibly means "in a fashion intended for display," not "this is what I'm guessing." You're also wrong: Germans just think eating and drinking in the car is gross. Discounting cars meant for export, no German cars have cupholders. I know this because I have actual German friends who've expressed surprise on finding out what those holes were for when they visited me.
You really shouldn't guess things and then use them to shore up your argument; when you turn out to be wrong it shoots your stance to hell. For example:
Meanwhile, they gave me an ashtray and cigarette lighter, because smoking is apparently a god-given right. How is smoking not distracting?
Since the absence of cupholders has nothing to do with distraction, this is an absurd question.
Basically, people will do distracting things while driving
And, luckily, if that's talking on a cellular phone, in better states like California, you will go right the fuck to jail, where you deserve to be. Welcome to the real world: you don't get to do whatever you want just because you think you're smarter than the law. (By the by, you aren't.)
You know, studies have actually been mixed in regards to this.
Every study I've ever seen claims cell phone driving to be worse than alcohol in as regards the effects on driving. Several people have claimed these studies are mixed; still, when I've asked for references, I've received none. I don't actually believe that there are studies which say otherwise. I believe that this is a case of people reporting misinformation they'd heard, something which is deeply offensive to those interested in factual argument.
I can't imagine that you'd actually want to be associated with something this unimpressive, or that you'd be so desperate to be right as to gloat about something you didn't do on a public site behind someone's back to a group of people who doesn't know or care about you.
This is the mark of desperation. If you want to seem like a big man, do something worthwhile. Don't bitch on Slashdot about something someone else did on IRC. You'll break your elbow, patting yourself on the back like that.
Brings back some memories, actually. Back around 1997 we used to use a simple ICMP ECHO (ping) packet with a payload of "+++ATH0". Anyone with a modem which did not follow the Hayes specification for the escape sequence (+++ followed by two seconds of "silence") would immediately hang up as the TCP/IP stack sent an ICMP ECHO RESPONSE with the same payload. Was great fun for two or three times.
The reason you shouldn't try to tell other people's stories is that people who actually understand what you're talking about laugh at you when you get it wrong. The AT standard required a half second pause between each plus, and there was no known modem which got that wrong. TCP is a packet-delivery system with allowed buffering; you cannot inject those pauses, and the headers for the packets prevent you from sending one plus every half second to any effect. The specific reason for the half second pause was to allow any binary data to be transmitted without accidentally triggering a hangup.
ICMP by definition cannot trigger the +++ effect in a remote host, ever, under any circumstances, nor can any technology run over IP, without exclusion. You, sir, are lying through your teeth.
The largest FOSS IRC network stores all its user passwords in plaintext, not a hash against which incoming passwords can be checked?
No, it stores them as salted MD5 hashes. That doesn't help when the user sends the password to the nickserv imitator in plaintext. It's a flaw in the IRC protocol, not in Freenode.
It's a good think that firetrap finally collapsed publicly.
Drama much? The hole was open for less than five minutes, and server population has gone down a whopping 0.6% .
Which is why good hash functions generate different hashes for every transaction from the same plaintext. Like including a timestamp.
Bit new to security, are we? You can't salt a password with a timestamp if you expect to store it and cannot expect the client to store the time at which the stamp was initially concocted. The scheme you're describing is for transitory security, not long-term security.
After all, we aren't smarter-than-thou elitists at Slashdot, are we?
Yes we are!:) And proud of it. I understand there was some irony in your comment, but it makes me think of something else.
*sniffle* It's moments like these that make me think my endless hours bitching about what irony actually means are worth it. Thank you for making a geezer happy.
In the context as I understood it, a hacker was simply someone who took a novel approach (typically a bizarre and often a shoddy job in the name of time or available materials) to a cerebral problem; thus, for example, one hacks out a schedule for next week until the full plans are set up, or sees a hackish repair job on an engine intended to carry it only as far as a mechanic. The term does, you'll remember, come originally from furniture manufacture.
That notwithstanding, thank you for being one of the few people who hasn't grafted into the "zomg my friends made the error too so now it's magically correct" sheep herd. I laud you your ability to stand up for common sense.
Words mean whatever people say they mean. It's the very definition of 'tautology'.
This is simply false. Words have an important historical usage context which is not discarded simply because one generation makes the mistake of listening to one badly educated entertainer. I'm not sure where this myth comes from, exactly, but I know not one single linguist who falls short of disgust for the legion of armchair quarterbacks professing this supposed deep understanding of the nature of the lexicon without ever having taken a linguistics class.
Grandparent is, in fact, correct. Words do not change simply because 1/4 of the population is a bunch of douchebags who don't know how to crack a book. When you're 50 and you watch these mistakes melt away in favor of the next generation's crop of errors, and begin to realize that these "changes" are impermanent, because they're merely errors, perhaps you'll begin to understand.
Linguistics is a science with a statistical and mathematical underpinning. Please do not further comment on its nature until you have at least a passing familiarity therewith, thank you.
No, it's "hackers" in the sense of the world that the vast majority of the world's population refers to it.
Mmm hmm. Fusion bombs aren't nuclear because most people are too stupid to know the difference. Irony isn't cruel happenstance because most people are too stupid to know the difference. Translucent doesn't mean partially transparent just because most people are too stupid to know the difference.
This word doesn't change because of popular dumb either. Descriptivists are apologists who don't understand the difference between a mistake and progress. Don't fall for their trap; common usage just doesn't shift that fast. Believe it or not, reporters can be mistaken. Note for example that the word "alleged" has a critical and specific meaning in law, that someone has been convicted of a crime. Now, pay attention to your local news, who will call someone who is held under suspicion or awaiting trial "alleged."
If a whole bunch of people start calling your wife a boat, is that suddenly a new legitimate usage for the word "boat?"
Yeah, the menace of the plastic toy dogs, and the humans who need several seconds to realize that stepping on them kills them. Also, they don't have teeth. You read too much Michael Crichton.
Unlike infants, Aibos don't have weak muscles, a constantly changing frame of reference, incomplete sensory wiring, balance problems or the need to carefully not fall down because of injury. It's a set of servos which was engineered by an adult. Maybe the Aibo's not stupid, but the designer sure is.
Ok, so the phone company acts as if they don't know what the numbers are? I call bullshit. Do you think the list that they turn over to the NSA/CIA/FBI has 'unknown caller' written all over it? Fuck no it doesnt. It probably gives the phone number, account holders name and address of every call, if not far more.
Actually, it does by law. Those records cannot be kept without a warrant. Nice try at inventing information to sound smart, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Without having read the actual scientific journal article (but just the very unscientific coverage of it), I have serious reservations about the study
... to make the error of assuming that association of two disparate events demonstrates cause and effect.
That tells us everything we need to know. You're worried about something you neither have read nor understood, but you feel empowered to tell other people how bad it is despite your ignorance.
Don't you have the good sense to be ashamed of behaving this way?
Cell phone radiation is of sufficiently low energy that I am not sure it can even penetrate INTO the brain. I am not sure this has ever been conclusively shown.
Oh nonsense. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with particle physics knows perfectly well that if it can penetrate several dozen steel or wood walls, it can make it through half an inch of bone. If you don't believe me, find your nearest cell tower, stand between it and your phone, and see whether you get a signal. That said, that cellular radiation can penetrate into the brain has been extensively shown in other animals, so unless you want to pretend the human brain is somehow different, then the reason you aren't sure is because you've never checked. A display of ignorance is not an argument against.
The issue isn't whether it can penetrate. The issue is whether it will collide on the way through.
I am a radiation oncologist by trade.
I'm not sure I believe that someone who doesn't think cell radiation can get into a brain could possibly be a trained particle physician.
So I'm a little outside my training here.
Real radiation oncologists are required to understand particle physics and its interaction with organic tissue. Those physical systems are as valid at cellphone energies as they are at x-ray and gamma energies. You shouldn't be outside your training if you are who you claim to be.
However, even some of the treatments we use only penetrate a centimeter or less, and these are much higher energy than radiation from cell phones, as far as I know.
A real radiation oncologist would know that the primary determinant in depth of penetration is the wavelength of the radiation, not the energy, which is why you can operate your ridiculously high energy devices and get only an inch penetration, and yet why a microwave running on AC power can wholly cook things. This whole thing rings false: if you are who you claim you are, then you are dangerously ignorant of your own job, a job on which other people's lives depend. If you are who you claim you are, I very much hope you will attend new training.
This study appears, at first blush, to make the error of...
How would you know? You haven't even read it!
If you'd read it, you'd know it didn't make that error (it's called the fallacy of conjunction, which an educated person should also know.)
If the brain is more active, their study design fails to prove that it is due to the radiation.
It has no such failure, and if you'd bother to read something before you criticised it, you'd know that. Of course, as a purported doctor, you should also be familiar with single-blind testing, which is in what they engaged, and whose specific nature is to eliminate the problem you're pretending you saw in a document you admit you didn't see.
Maybe the brain becomes more excitable because the study subject just got a phone call from a friend or loved one?
The subjects weren't receiving calls. Read the paper before criticising obvious falsehoods.
It might be that the original article addresses some of these shortcomings.
I should hope that in the future you have the decency to not karma whore like this. This sort of nonsense grandstanding and ego-driven lying (yes, I'm calling you a liar - you're criticising something you've never read with things that are patently false, and feigning comprehension of things you obviously don't comprehend) is the primary basis of disinformation.
As a (supposed) doctor, you of all people should know how dangerous and unethical this is. You're lucky I don't know where you work.
We've been watching people talking to their passengers, even in the back seat, and turning around to listen to them.
Yeah, that's illegal too. Believe it or not, the law actually requires the driver to watch the road. Therefore, your example carries no contrarian weight; all you've done is to shore up that cellular during driving is a bad idea.
Some people can handle talking on the cellphone while driving
Studies show they can't. I had friends in college who would insist they could handle driving drunk, too. Several of them are now dead, and several more have been in serious accidents as a result. Just because you have managed to skate by and get lucky doesn't mean you can handle it.
That said, if that was the only problem, I'd say "hey, go nuts; if you're dumb enough to distract yourself in a ton of metal moving at 60 mph, I'd like you out of the gene pool." But, that's not the only problem. You're not just putting yourself at risk with your openly naïve insistance based on zero actual knowledge that what everyone around you has seen to cause fatalities is actually okay.
You're putting us at risk of death too, by your insistence on believing something that studies and experience show is just false. That is not acceptable.
I find it nothing short of amazing that you're willing to pretend to yourself that some people can handle it, after saying If we are realistic, we can't accept that, because we know it's not true. If you want other people to be reasonable and to take a handle on common knowledge, you'll need to do it too. Otherwise, you're just a hypocrite.
If you would advocate banning one thing, then you should advocate banning all these things, and only allowing passengers on public transportation. All other travel should be done using single-person vehicles.
By that same line of argument, coffee, beer and soda (and sugar water) should be outlawed because they have a psychoactive effect, and Absinthe is illegal. If you attempt to outlaw any of those three drinks, Slashdot will murder you.
What you're engaging in is a combination of unrepresentative sample and false dichotomy. You have posited the situation where if something is banned, everything else which could have any similar description should also be banned. This is absurd: things aren't black and white. That's why we can ban pornography from broadcast television but still let them show soap operas and NYPD blue. This is why we can ban "fuck" from the broadcast airwaves, but let people get away with "damn" and "darn." This is why people can smoke cigarettes but not heroin. This is why people can have pistols but not rocket launchers. This is why we require helmets on motorcycles, but not plate mail.
Furthermore, though, the idea that talking
It comes with no cupholders, ostensibly because they want you to think about driving, and not drinking something.
Ostensibly means "in a fashion intended for display," not "this is what I'm guessing." You're also wrong: Germans just think eating and drinking in the car is gross. Discounting cars meant for export, no German cars have cupholders. I know this because I have actual German friends who've expressed surprise on finding out what those holes were for when they visited me.
You really shouldn't guess things and then use them to shore up your argument; when you turn out to be wrong it shoots your stance to hell. For example:
Meanwhile, they gave me an ashtray and cigarette lighter, because smoking is apparently a god-given right. How is smoking not distracting?
Since the absence of cupholders has nothing to do with distraction, this is an absurd question.
Basically, people will do distracting things while driving
And, luckily, if that's talking on a cellular phone, in better states like California, you will go right the fuck to jail, where you deserve to be. Welcome to the real world: you don't get to do whatever you want just because you think you're smarter than the law. (By the by, you aren't.)
You know, studies have actually been mixed in regards to this.
Every study I've ever seen claims cell phone driving to be worse than alcohol in as regards the effects on driving. Several people have claimed these studies are mixed; still, when I've asked for references, I've received none. I don't actually believe that there are studies which say otherwise. I believe that this is a case of people reporting misinformation they'd heard, something which is deeply offensive to those interested in factual argument.
Would you be so kind as to prove me wrong?
And now for a lesson: referring to Wikipedia to settle issues of common misconception is an exercise in folly. When debating popular error, do not refer to the populace.
You are a tech fanboy, who can't see the ugly facts because you love IRC so much.
I actually don't much like IRC, but thanks for attempting to hide your mistake behind some ad hominem.
This could have easily been prevented if IRC wasn't being pushed to be what it isn't (namely secure and scalable).
IRC is way more scalable than Jabber, actually. That's one of the primary reasons for *not* switching.
I can't imagine that you'd actually want to be associated with something this unimpressive, or that you'd be so desperate to be right as to gloat about something you didn't do on a public site behind someone's back to a group of people who doesn't know or care about you.
This is the mark of desperation. If you want to seem like a big man, do something worthwhile. Don't bitch on Slashdot about something someone else did on IRC. You'll break your elbow, patting yourself on the back like that.
A truely secure system should have no trusted components.
There is no such thing as a truly secure system. Acting in any fashion which does not expect compromise begets compromise in the long run.
What kind of auth protocol sends passwords in plaintext across the network, rather than hashing them at the client for comparison at the server?
IRC doesn't have an auth protocol. That's the whole problem. The flaw isn't Freenode at all.
Why should NickServ have access to the clear passwords?
It doesn't. People just tried to use the impostor, and thereby divulged their passwords. That's why it affected less than 25 people.
Yes, let's trust some random site to create all of our passwords for us.
/><body><form action="makepass.php"><input value="Put URL here" name="salt"><input value="Put any non-empty passphrase here"><input type="submit"></form></body></html>";
Or, better yet, let's do it locally, which is safe:
<?php if (isset($_POST['salt'])) {
echo md5($_GET['salt'] . $_GET['pass']);
} else {
echo "<html><head
}
?>
Brings back some memories, actually. Back around 1997 we used to use a simple ICMP ECHO (ping) packet with a payload of "+++ATH0". Anyone with a modem which did not follow the Hayes specification for the escape sequence (+++ followed by two seconds of "silence") would immediately hang up as the TCP/IP stack sent an ICMP ECHO RESPONSE with the same payload. Was great fun for two or three times.
The reason you shouldn't try to tell other people's stories is that people who actually understand what you're talking about laugh at you when you get it wrong. The AT standard required a half second pause between each plus, and there was no known modem which got that wrong. TCP is a packet-delivery system with allowed buffering; you cannot inject those pauses, and the headers for the packets prevent you from sending one plus every half second to any effect. The specific reason for the half second pause was to allow any binary data to be transmitted without accidentally triggering a hangup.
ICMP by definition cannot trigger the +++ effect in a remote host, ever, under any circumstances, nor can any technology run over IP, without exclusion. You, sir, are lying through your teeth.
The largest FOSS IRC network stores all its user passwords in plaintext, not a hash against which incoming passwords can be checked?
No, it stores them as salted MD5 hashes. That doesn't help when the user sends the password to the nickserv imitator in plaintext. It's a flaw in the IRC protocol, not in Freenode.
It's a good think that firetrap finally collapsed publicly.
Drama much? The hole was open for less than five minutes, and server population has gone down a whopping 0.6% .
Which is why good hash functions generate different hashes for every transaction from the same plaintext. Like including a timestamp.
Bit new to security, are we? You can't salt a password with a timestamp if you expect to store it and cannot expect the client to store the time at which the stamp was initially concocted. The scheme you're describing is for transitory security, not long-term security.
And, this got modded interesting why, exactly?
Cue the poker and penis enlargement ads in about (looks at watch) now.
After all, we aren't smarter-than-thou elitists at Slashdot, are we?
:) And proud of it. I understand there was some irony in your comment, but it makes me think of something else.
Yes we are!
*sniffle* It's moments like these that make me think my endless hours bitching about what irony actually means are worth it. Thank you for making a geezer happy.
In the context as I understood it, a hacker was simply someone who took a novel approach (typically a bizarre and often a shoddy job in the name of time or available materials) to a cerebral problem; thus, for example, one hacks out a schedule for next week until the full plans are set up, or sees a hackish repair job on an engine intended to carry it only as far as a mechanic. The term does, you'll remember, come originally from furniture manufacture.
That notwithstanding, thank you for being one of the few people who hasn't grafted into the "zomg my friends made the error too so now it's magically correct" sheep herd. I laud you your ability to stand up for common sense.
Words mean whatever people say they mean. It's the very definition of 'tautology'.
This is simply false. Words have an important historical usage context which is not discarded simply because one generation makes the mistake of listening to one badly educated entertainer. I'm not sure where this myth comes from, exactly, but I know not one single linguist who falls short of disgust for the legion of armchair quarterbacks professing this supposed deep understanding of the nature of the lexicon without ever having taken a linguistics class.
Grandparent is, in fact, correct. Words do not change simply because 1/4 of the population is a bunch of douchebags who don't know how to crack a book. When you're 50 and you watch these mistakes melt away in favor of the next generation's crop of errors, and begin to realize that these "changes" are impermanent, because they're merely errors, perhaps you'll begin to understand.
Linguistics is a science with a statistical and mathematical underpinning. Please do not further comment on its nature until you have at least a passing familiarity therewith, thank you.
No, it's "hackers" in the sense of the world that the vast majority of the world's population refers to it.
Mmm hmm. Fusion bombs aren't nuclear because most people are too stupid to know the difference. Irony isn't cruel happenstance because most people are too stupid to know the difference. Translucent doesn't mean partially transparent just because most people are too stupid to know the difference.
This word doesn't change because of popular dumb either. Descriptivists are apologists who don't understand the difference between a mistake and progress. Don't fall for their trap; common usage just doesn't shift that fast. Believe it or not, reporters can be mistaken. Note for example that the word "alleged" has a critical and specific meaning in law, that someone has been convicted of a crime. Now, pay attention to your local news, who will call someone who is held under suspicion or awaiting trial "alleged."
If a whole bunch of people start calling your wife a boat, is that suddenly a new legitimate usage for the word "boat?"
Because they're not smart enough to be productive. Same reason GNAA has always trolled. Same reason DarkFader writes viruses
I've have one question. Why are you still surprised?
Yeah, the menace of the plastic toy dogs, and the humans who need several seconds to realize that stepping on them kills them. Also, they don't have teeth. You read too much Michael Crichton.
Unlike infants, Aibos don't have weak muscles, a constantly changing frame of reference, incomplete sensory wiring, balance problems or the need to carefully not fall down because of injury. It's a set of servos which was engineered by an adult. Maybe the Aibo's not stupid, but the designer sure is.
No doubt an exerpt from Ball Runner.
Odd - I'd imagined it'd be a beo-wolf cluster.
Ok, so the phone company acts as if they don't know what the numbers are? I call bullshit. Do you think the list that they turn over to the NSA/CIA/FBI has 'unknown caller' written all over it? Fuck no it doesnt. It probably gives the phone number, account holders name and address of every call, if not far more.
Actually, it does by law. Those records cannot be kept without a warrant. Nice try at inventing information to sound smart, though.