Plenty of organisms can survive nontrivial periods of complete metabolic shutdown, combined with some amount of cellular damage, and rehydrate and go on without significant trouble. Tardigrades are probably the most charismatic ones (survives 10 days of unprotected exposure to spaceflight and looks like an adorable little alien bear!); but extremophilic bacteria are even tougher.
Even humans will (with odds lousy enough that you don't want to try it; but good enough that documentation is available) survive short periods of total circulatory shutdown or longer ones of inactivity in very cold water.
'Resurrection' of an organism in a more advanced state of damage (or an organism for which precise brain configuration is considered important) is likely more fundamentally problematic. Even if you had indistinguishable-from-magic nanobots and the option to rebuild atom by atom, if you don't have somebody's 'correct' neural state on file, there are any number of configurations that would work; but wouldn't be the person you are trying to revive.
Should be 'Officer'. For some reason, damned if I know why, the source PDF uses "Unicode Character 'LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI' (U+FB03)" instead of "ffi" in the middle of "Officer". When I cut and pasted, Slashdot silently ate the oddball character and left the rest.
Apparently SCO UNIXware is still around, though I assume that it's more of an absurdist performance art piece with a couple of legacy customers than an actual operating system at this point.
What's wrong with saying the law is 'ripe for abuse'? Sure, the most common uses of 'ripe' are literal references to fruits and cheese and stuff; but using to in the more generic sense of full maturation or maximum readiness is perfectly valid practice.
I don't know if he noticed it, or the system measured and displayed it(which is common enough for multiplayer matchmaking software to do, and requires no special skills); but if you live in New Zealand your ping to just about anything other than Middle Earth is going to suck.
Dotcom's claims of noticing an extra 20ms 'as a gamer' rather than 'as somebody looking at the ping displayed next to various multiplayer serves' are somewhat dubious; but there are a few additional details to his story.
Apparently, as a major Modern Warfare 3 enthusiast, and living at more or less the far end of the earth, Dotcom took his ping pretty seriously and had a dedicated line installed from his house to the peering exchange in Auckland's Sky Tower. When his ping increased, he pulled customer support in to sort it out and they determined that his connection had picked up a few extra hops within NZ.
Perhaps we need expanded powers to control dissemination of information prejudicial to public support for anti-terrorism powers... That seems like the correct solution.
Miranda was stopped at the airport, presumably under the terms of Terrorism Act 2000 Schedule 7: "Ports and Border Controls"(on page 108)
"Power to stop, question and detain
2.—(1) An examining ocer may question a person to whom this paragraph
applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling
within section 40(1)(b).
(2) This paragraph applies to a person if—
(a) he is at a port or in the border area, and
(b) the examining ocer believes that the person’s presence at the port or
in the area is connected with his entering or leaving Great Britain or
Northern Ireland.
(3) This paragraph also applies to a person on a ship or aircraft which has
arrived in Great Britain or Northern Ireland.
(4) An examining ocer may exercise his powers under this paragraph
whether or not he has grounds for suspecting that a person falls within section
40(1)(b)."(emphasis mine)
The law actually says, explicitly, that the powers of border detention can be exercised without meeting any standard of suspicion, 'reasonable' or otherwise. If that wasn't designed to be abused, I'm not sure what would qualify, it overtly allows up to 9 hours detention on any grounds whatsoever, or none. ('section 40(1)(b)' defines a 'terrorist')
The sentence is a bit ambiguous; but it could be read to mean that there are ~15 million UPnP devices (or even ~15 million UPnP devices that started with the vulnerability for which the patch was available) on the public internet. That would seem slightly more plausible; though the sentence itself isn't very clear.
In fairness to the UN, it should be noted that (the face of overwhelming 'evidence' from those fancy 'biologists' that they could no longer deny) the UN has changed its position from "Cholera? Wasn't us, probably just Haiti being filthy." to "Yeah, it was us; but we enjoy impunity, haha."
It's always nice to see somebody owning up to their mistakes.
Sounds like this is basically only useful to help maintain a low-power consumption orbit of heavenly bodies with strong magnetic fields(aka just earth in our solar system).
As in it wont work at all, when removed from the earths magnetic field.
It certainly isn't an unobtanium reactionless thruster, which would be nice; but given the economic importance of nearish-earth satellites, giving them a lifespan limited only by solar panel decay and/or technical problems, rather than propellant load, is a pretty nice little upgrade.
I'm pretty sure that the first rule of helping is "Don't introduce a hitherto absent, highly contagious, disease to a country infrastructurally incapable of coping with it, killing more than 7,000 and sickening just short of 600,000."
Well, maybe not the first rule; but one of the important ones. Virtually every country (even two-bit ones where these controls are largely nominal because the border functionaries are deeply inadequate to the task) has rules in place to avoid the introduction of novel crop pests and at least some diseases, so it isn't as though the concept is a novel one.
Failing to perform a "Do our staff harbor any diseases that would spread like wildfire in a country with ghastly sanitation and minimal resources" check before heading into a country with ghastly sanitation and minimal resources is somewhere between incompetence and reckless indifference.
First, there's no evidence that UN has started the cholera epidemic. No bacterial strain genotyping has been performed. Second, in such cases a cholera epidemic is more-or-less a certainty - it makes no sense to search for the index case, especially because choleric bacteria occur naturally.
"Peacekeeping soldiers are paid by their own Governments according to their own national rank and salary scale. Countries volunteering uniformed personnel to peacekeeping operations are reimbursed by the UN at a standard rate, approved by the General Assembly, of a little over US$1,028 per soldier per month."(Some countries pay an additional stipend to soldiers on peacekeeping operations, large enough to be significant in areas with low salaries)
I'd imagine that it's partly that Nepal is one of the countries poor enough that they can deploy peacekeepers for profit(the UN standard rate, per soldier, is paid in USD and identical across contributing nations, so it goes a hell of a lot further in some countries than in others, depending on local pay scales and willingness to accept casualties) and partly Nepal's history of fielding soldiers as part of (English speaking, which is convenient for international peacekeeping missions) British colonial activities.
However, Article VIII "Settlement of Disputes" states that:
Section 29. The United Nations
shall make provisions for appropriate
modes of settlement of :
(a) disputes arising out of
contracts or other disputes of a private
law character to which the United
Nations is a party;
(b) disputes involving any official
of the United Nations who by reason of
his official position enjoys immunity, if
immunity has not been waived by the
Secretary-General.
Section 30. All differences arising
out of the interpretation or application
of the present convention shall be
referred to the International Court of
Justice, unless in any case it is agreed
by the parties to have recourse to
another mode of settlement. If a
difference arises between the
United Nations on the one hand and a
Member on the other hand, a request
shall be made for an advisory opinion
on any legal question involved in
accordance with Article 96 of the
Charter and Article 65 of the Statue of
the Court. The opinion given by the
Court shall be accepted as decisive by
the parties.
So, the Convention under which they claim immunity requires them to "make provisions for appropriate
modes of settlement"(something which apparently hasn't happened since 1946, no doubt Coming Real Soon Now) and makes the UN an entity subject to ICJ jurisdiction in the event of a dispute between a UN member state and the UN itself.
It certainly is the case that the random Nepalese troops who actually introduced the Cholera enjoy diplomat-grade immunity under this convention (and, even if they didn't, their actual crime is probably some sort of relatively minor sanitary code violation); but the assertion that the UN, as an organization, enjoys immunity is suspect at best.
I think that the Ivies focus more on rejection rates (If you can't get acceptances down to the single digits, you are letting just anyone in); but actually boast extremely high completion rates(this, of course, may hide a large number of would-be doctors who hit the organic chemistry weeder and decided that something a little softer was more their style; but actually flunking somebody out once you've let them in is... unseemly).
An enthusiasm for attrition seems to be more of a tech school thing.
One of the places where Bitcoin opens an interesting door is the democratization of money laundering, international purchasing, and other such realms where knowing the right people and being able to afford their services have traditionally been a gatekeeper that keeps out the riffraff.
They aren't necessarily in a position to actually use it (at least until somebody hacks together a bitcoin system that can be run over SMS (maybe Java ME, though it wouldn't surprise me to see crap Android handsets push basic feature phones out of most of the market before that 'platform' becomes something you can actually target across a nontrivial range of devices...); but the ability to cheaply transfer them would theoretically make bitcoins popular with the immigrant-diasporas-remitting-to-home-country userbase: the lower on the totem pole you go, the crazier the fees for moving money around get. It would be nice to see Western Union feel the pinch a bit.
On a personal level, cash is quite dense. A million dollars would fit in a (heavy) suitcase, no problem.
Conveniently, despite the heavy US use of imperial measures, all our bills weigh ~1 gram each, which makes sizing your money mules relatively easy. In 100s, it's only ten kilograms per million (though hundreds provoke suspicion, especially in quantity, at many points of use, so you might have to go with the 'hit the gym and carry 50kg of 20s' strategy).
"from the assorted oddball synthetic commodities that people (albeit generally not the general public) have been trading for years"
It is true that doing fractional reserve banking with bitcoins would be more difficult (though I suspect that a bank interested in doing so could simply create a promissory note "Good for one bitcoin, but not any particular one, to be transferred to the designated wallet upon request", which could then be fractionally-reserved as far as they thought they could get away with it...); but that isn't really relevant to my point, which was just that applying rules for capital gains to bitcoins is no more difficult (and really probably a great deal easier, since bitcoins were designed by currency purists, rather than risk-crazed investment bankers) than applying them to all the various other weirdo assets that get traded.
As a currency the built-in hostility to more or less any inflationary tendency is somewhat unusual; but that isn't a significant factor when assessing capital gains or losses from trading them.
But how about when it has to do with money and taxes? Oh boy, so now they understand perfectly?
I actually never thought governments would move this fast to regulate BitCoins.
I suspect it helps that, while they depend on a novel mechanism for preventing duplication and double spending, BitCoins aren't really conceptually much different, once they hit the market, from the assorted oddball synthetic commodities that people (albeit generally not the general public) have been trading for years, often decades.
This means that governments are both already familiar with similar things (so they probably have applicable laws or easily adapted laws on the books) and that governments are already familiar with the tendency to concoct and sell ever more creative synthetic assets (so they are probably already used to dealing with new asset flavors popping up, and either have a system for moving quickly or sufficiently broad definitions to catch what the investment bankers have been inventing).
That's the thing: bitcoins are architecturally somewhat novel; but as a commodity that people trade with each other (especially if they trade for currency or for securities with established market values) it really doesn't bring anything fundamentally new to the table. We already have 150+ currencies in circulation, and an unknown number of stocks, bonds, futures, and more exotic derivatives. The fact that bitcoins use a different anti-counterfeiting measure doesn't really make a whole lot of difference when trying to slot them into existing regulatory structures.
Paper money and coins are just as anonymous, and we've been working with them fairly well for a thousand years.
One difference is that physical currency tends to make moving large sums a bit awkward. It's doable, especially if nobody pats you down or you have an uninspected cargo container to work with; but the sheer inconvenience and risk discourages very large scale movements of physical currency (though, given currency's role in 'informal economy' arrangements, there are a lot of people moving small amounts of it).
Honor system, but if you do anything to get on their shitlist they'll eventually find it out when you try and get it converted into salable assets.
And bitcoin's design matchess the 'well, we don't really have any way of knowing; but you are in serious trouble if we find out' enforcement model pretty well. Watching the block chain is already a thing in suitably interested hobbyist circles, and doing so doesn't require any blackhat wizard-fu, it's a protocol feature. For the moment, the transaction history is also relatively small.
None of that helps them connect a person to one or more wallet addresses; but if they do, by other means (probably if you try to cash out, possibly by surveillance of improperly anonymized use), they get a full transaction history automatically.
Plus, you can tow 10 skiers behind a snowmobile. And a dog team seems to meet most of your requirements. Depending on the size of missile you can strap to a dog.
In Soviet Russia, if you have the dog and the warhead you can skip the missile...
It will be very interesting to see what their retention numbers end up looking like. We've had cheap, modestly interactive, education since 'correspondence courses' hit the scene (examples date to at least the 18th century, with spikes and troughs in popularity over time); but we've had less success getting the results achieved in-person from even the most tech-laden variations.
I was attempting a joke. Syllogisms have friends because they are relatively easy and provide easy access to valid (albeit not necessarily true) conclusions; but aren't actually of any significant use for attacking problems in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
How 'dead' do you want the organism to be?
Plenty of organisms can survive nontrivial periods of complete metabolic shutdown, combined with some amount of cellular damage, and rehydrate and go on without significant trouble. Tardigrades are probably the most charismatic ones (survives 10 days of unprotected exposure to spaceflight and looks like an adorable little alien bear!); but extremophilic bacteria are even tougher.
Even humans will (with odds lousy enough that you don't want to try it; but good enough that documentation is available) survive short periods of total circulatory shutdown or longer ones of inactivity in very cold water.
'Resurrection' of an organism in a more advanced state of damage (or an organism for which precise brain configuration is considered important) is likely more fundamentally problematic. Even if you had indistinguishable-from-magic nanobots and the option to rebuild atom by atom, if you don't have somebody's 'correct' neural state on file, there are any number of configurations that would work; but wouldn't be the person you are trying to revive.
Should be 'Officer'. For some reason, damned if I know why, the source PDF uses "Unicode Character 'LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FFI' (U+FB03)" instead of "ffi" in the middle of "Officer". When I cut and pasted, Slashdot silently ate the oddball character and left the rest.
Apparently SCO UNIXware is still around, though I assume that it's more of an absurdist performance art piece with a couple of legacy customers than an actual operating system at this point.
What's wrong with saying the law is 'ripe for abuse'? Sure, the most common uses of 'ripe' are literal references to fruits and cheese and stuff; but using to in the more generic sense of full maturation or maximum readiness is perfectly valid practice.
I don't know if he noticed it, or the system measured and displayed it(which is common enough for multiplayer matchmaking software to do, and requires no special skills); but if you live in New Zealand your ping to just about anything other than Middle Earth is going to suck.
Dotcom's claims of noticing an extra 20ms 'as a gamer' rather than 'as somebody looking at the ping displayed next to various multiplayer serves' are somewhat dubious; but there are a few additional details to his story.
Apparently, as a major Modern Warfare 3 enthusiast, and living at more or less the far end of the earth, Dotcom took his ping pretty seriously and had a dedicated line installed from his house to the peering exchange in Auckland's Sky Tower. When his ping increased, he pulled customer support in to sort it out and they determined that his connection had picked up a few extra hops within NZ.
Perhaps we need expanded powers to control dissemination of information prejudicial to public support for anti-terrorism powers... That seems like the correct solution.
The law is ripe for abuse as written:
Miranda was stopped at the airport, presumably under the terms of Terrorism Act 2000 Schedule 7: "Ports and Border Controls"(on page 108)
"Power to stop, question and detain
2.—(1) An examining ocer may question a person to whom this paragraph applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within section 40(1)(b).
(2) This paragraph applies to a person if—
(a) he is at a port or in the border area, and
(b) the examining ocer believes that the person’s presence at the port or in the area is connected with his entering or leaving Great Britain or Northern Ireland.
(3) This paragraph also applies to a person on a ship or aircraft which has arrived in Great Britain or Northern Ireland.
(4) An examining ocer may exercise his powers under this paragraph whether or not he has grounds for suspecting that a person falls within section 40(1)(b)."(emphasis mine)
The law actually says, explicitly, that the powers of border detention can be exercised without meeting any standard of suspicion, 'reasonable' or otherwise. If that wasn't designed to be abused, I'm not sure what would qualify, it overtly allows up to 9 hours detention on any grounds whatsoever, or none. ('section 40(1)(b)' defines a 'terrorist')
The sentence is a bit ambiguous; but it could be read to mean that there are ~15 million UPnP devices (or even ~15 million UPnP devices that started with the vulnerability for which the patch was available) on the public internet. That would seem slightly more plausible; though the sentence itself isn't very clear.
In fairness to the UN, it should be noted that (the face of overwhelming 'evidence' from those fancy 'biologists' that they could no longer deny) the UN has changed its position from "Cholera? Wasn't us, probably just Haiti being filthy." to "Yeah, it was us; but we enjoy impunity, haha."
It's always nice to see somebody owning up to their mistakes.
Sounds like this is basically only useful to help maintain a low-power consumption orbit of heavenly bodies with strong magnetic fields(aka just earth in our solar system). As in it wont work at all, when removed from the earths magnetic field.
It certainly isn't an unobtanium reactionless thruster, which would be nice; but given the economic importance of nearish-earth satellites, giving them a lifespan limited only by solar panel decay and/or technical problems, rather than propellant load, is a pretty nice little upgrade.
I'm pretty sure that the first rule of helping is "Don't introduce a hitherto absent, highly contagious, disease to a country infrastructurally incapable of coping with it, killing more than 7,000 and sickening just short of 600,000."
Well, maybe not the first rule; but one of the important ones. Virtually every country (even two-bit ones where these controls are largely nominal because the border functionaries are deeply inadequate to the task) has rules in place to avoid the introduction of novel crop pests and at least some diseases, so it isn't as though the concept is a novel one.
Failing to perform a "Do our staff harbor any diseases that would spread like wildfire in a country with ghastly sanitation and minimal resources" check before heading into a country with ghastly sanitation and minimal resources is somewhere between incompetence and reckless indifference.
First, there's no evidence that UN has started the cholera epidemic. No bacterial strain genotyping has been performed. Second, in such cases a cholera epidemic is more-or-less a certainty - it makes no sense to search for the index case, especially because choleric bacteria occur naturally.
O Rly?
This(ignore the facebook bullshit, not needed to just read it online) offers some interesting theoretical tidbits.
The UN explains the financial side.
"Peacekeeping soldiers are paid by their own Governments according to their own national rank and salary scale. Countries volunteering uniformed personnel to peacekeeping operations are reimbursed by the UN at a standard rate, approved by the General Assembly, of a little over US$1,028 per soldier per month."(Some countries pay an additional stipend to soldiers on peacekeeping operations, large enough to be significant in areas with low salaries)
I'd imagine that it's partly that Nepal is one of the countries poor enough that they can deploy peacekeepers for profit(the UN standard rate, per soldier, is paid in USD and identical across contributing nations, so it goes a hell of a lot further in some countries than in others, depending on local pay scales and willingness to accept casualties) and partly Nepal's history of fielding soldiers as part of (English speaking, which is convenient for international peacekeeping missions) British colonial activities.
The UN claims immunity under the "Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations", which is largely what it sounds like.
However, Article VIII "Settlement of Disputes" states that:
Section 29. The United Nations shall make provisions for appropriate modes of settlement of :
(a) disputes arising out of contracts or other disputes of a private law character to which the United Nations is a party;
(b) disputes involving any official of the United Nations who by reason of his official position enjoys immunity, if immunity has not been waived by the Secretary-General.
Section 30. All differences arising out of the interpretation or application of the present convention shall be referred to the International Court of Justice, unless in any case it is agreed by the parties to have recourse to another mode of settlement. If a difference arises between the United Nations on the one hand and a Member on the other hand, a request shall be made for an advisory opinion on any legal question involved in accordance with Article 96 of the Charter and Article 65 of the Statue of the Court. The opinion given by the Court shall be accepted as decisive by the parties.
So, the Convention under which they claim immunity requires them to "make provisions for appropriate modes of settlement"(something which apparently hasn't happened since 1946, no doubt Coming Real Soon Now) and makes the UN an entity subject to ICJ jurisdiction in the event of a dispute between a UN member state and the UN itself.
It certainly is the case that the random Nepalese troops who actually introduced the Cholera enjoy diplomat-grade immunity under this convention (and, even if they didn't, their actual crime is probably some sort of relatively minor sanitary code violation); but the assertion that the UN, as an organization, enjoys immunity is suspect at best.
I think that the Ivies focus more on rejection rates (If you can't get acceptances down to the single digits, you are letting just anyone in); but actually boast extremely high completion rates(this, of course, may hide a large number of would-be doctors who hit the organic chemistry weeder and decided that something a little softer was more their style; but actually flunking somebody out once you've let them in is... unseemly).
An enthusiasm for attrition seems to be more of a tech school thing.
One of the places where Bitcoin opens an interesting door is the democratization of money laundering, international purchasing, and other such realms where knowing the right people and being able to afford their services have traditionally been a gatekeeper that keeps out the riffraff.
They aren't necessarily in a position to actually use it (at least until somebody hacks together a bitcoin system that can be run over SMS (maybe Java ME, though it wouldn't surprise me to see crap Android handsets push basic feature phones out of most of the market before that 'platform' becomes something you can actually target across a nontrivial range of devices...); but the ability to cheaply transfer them would theoretically make bitcoins popular with the immigrant-diasporas-remitting-to-home-country userbase: the lower on the totem pole you go, the crazier the fees for moving money around get. It would be nice to see Western Union feel the pinch a bit.
On a personal level, cash is quite dense. A million dollars would fit in a (heavy) suitcase, no problem.
Conveniently, despite the heavy US use of imperial measures, all our bills weigh ~1 gram each, which makes sizing your money mules relatively easy. In 100s, it's only ten kilograms per million (though hundreds provoke suspicion, especially in quantity, at many points of use, so you might have to go with the 'hit the gym and carry 50kg of 20s' strategy).
"from the assorted oddball synthetic commodities that people (albeit generally not the general public) have been trading for years"
It is true that doing fractional reserve banking with bitcoins would be more difficult (though I suspect that a bank interested in doing so could simply create a promissory note "Good for one bitcoin, but not any particular one, to be transferred to the designated wallet upon request", which could then be fractionally-reserved as far as they thought they could get away with it...); but that isn't really relevant to my point, which was just that applying rules for capital gains to bitcoins is no more difficult (and really probably a great deal easier, since bitcoins were designed by currency purists, rather than risk-crazed investment bankers) than applying them to all the various other weirdo assets that get traded.
As a currency the built-in hostility to more or less any inflationary tendency is somewhat unusual; but that isn't a significant factor when assessing capital gains or losses from trading them.
But how about when it has to do with money and taxes? Oh boy, so now they understand perfectly?
I actually never thought governments would move this fast to regulate BitCoins.
I suspect it helps that, while they depend on a novel mechanism for preventing duplication and double spending, BitCoins aren't really conceptually much different, once they hit the market, from the assorted oddball synthetic commodities that people (albeit generally not the general public) have been trading for years, often decades.
This means that governments are both already familiar with similar things (so they probably have applicable laws or easily adapted laws on the books) and that governments are already familiar with the tendency to concoct and sell ever more creative synthetic assets (so they are probably already used to dealing with new asset flavors popping up, and either have a system for moving quickly or sufficiently broad definitions to catch what the investment bankers have been inventing).
That's the thing: bitcoins are architecturally somewhat novel; but as a commodity that people trade with each other (especially if they trade for currency or for securities with established market values) it really doesn't bring anything fundamentally new to the table. We already have 150+ currencies in circulation, and an unknown number of stocks, bonds, futures, and more exotic derivatives. The fact that bitcoins use a different anti-counterfeiting measure doesn't really make a whole lot of difference when trying to slot them into existing regulatory structures.
Paper money and coins are just as anonymous, and we've been working with them fairly well for a thousand years.
One difference is that physical currency tends to make moving large sums a bit awkward. It's doable, especially if nobody pats you down or you have an uninspected cargo container to work with; but the sheer inconvenience and risk discourages very large scale movements of physical currency (though, given currency's role in 'informal economy' arrangements, there are a lot of people moving small amounts of it).
Honor system, but if you do anything to get on their shitlist they'll eventually find it out when you try and get it converted into salable assets.
And bitcoin's design matchess the 'well, we don't really have any way of knowing; but you are in serious trouble if we find out' enforcement model pretty well. Watching the block chain is already a thing in suitably interested hobbyist circles, and doing so doesn't require any blackhat wizard-fu, it's a protocol feature. For the moment, the transaction history is also relatively small.
None of that helps them connect a person to one or more wallet addresses; but if they do, by other means (probably if you try to cash out, possibly by surveillance of improperly anonymized use), they get a full transaction history automatically.
Plus, you can tow 10 skiers behind a snowmobile. And a dog team seems to meet most of your requirements. Depending on the size of missile you can strap to a dog.
In Soviet Russia, if you have the dog and the warhead you can skip the missile...
It will be very interesting to see what their retention numbers end up looking like. We've had cheap, modestly interactive, education since 'correspondence courses' hit the scene (examples date to at least the 18th century, with spikes and troughs in popularity over time); but we've had less success getting the results achieved in-person from even the most tech-laden variations.
I was attempting a joke. Syllogisms have friends because they are relatively easy and provide easy access to valid (albeit not necessarily true) conclusions; but aren't actually of any significant use for attacking problems in the world.