Yes, I'm sure people making unapproved long distance calls has been at the front of DHS's security concerns, and their failure to anticipate the situation clearly indicates their inability to function successfully in any other capacity.
I have as many criticisms of the government as anyone else. But people who don't take the problems seriously are only half the issue. The other half is people like you who can relate a small technical problem which may not even be worth fixing (have you analyzed the cost to upgrade vs. the cost of the occasional prankster?) to every other criticism you have of the U.S. government.
Those of us with real concerns about government failings then have to fight to be taken seriously.
Depending on the specifics of what this guy's dealing with, he may be subject to rules regarding the safe disposal of certain chemicals, etc.
But the obvious fact is that he was not being persecuted under any of those regulations. The didn't see "vial x" and a think "this guy has too much of vial x, it is against the law." Or take a swab of his drain and say "this isn't being properly disposed of!"
What actually happened was that they decided to seize all of his crap so that they could look through it and find laws that he was in violation of. That's a definite NO. Should the police be able to drop by your house and raid all of your stuff on the same justification--"hey, maybe something in there is illegal."
Besides being a clear violation of constitutional protections, this seems a terrible attack on science. How many of the great chemists of history do you think could or would have started up if held to such limiting regulations?
I've watched a few episodes of cops where, after raiding a crack den or whatever, the cops then pose as the dealers and do a sting on everyone who buys the product. It seems like it should be similar here--raid the servers, and identify the clientÃle.
But the REALLY important thing, and I do mean the REALLY important thing, is to trackdown and rescue the exploited children. I'm okay with punishing people for participating in the distribution process; however, the reason we view it as so despicable is because of the value we place on the children involved, and our primary efforts should certainly be directed toward finding the source of child porn vs. find the recipients.
Um... haven't we had a bunch of articles on Slashdot about how the U.S. is *underproducing* science and engineering students?
It would be one thing if we had way too many and, for the available jobs, men were being unfairly selected over women. But when you have a general shortage how can you possibly increase the % women except for diminishing the quantity of men? Are they just going to fire people with Y chromosomes and leave their positions unfilled?
What I want to know is why it is apparently so abhorrent that women are going into fields like teaching, physical therapy, etc. instead of physics. Hero-complex aside, most people would much rather have these kinds of jobs than spend all day reading research papers and crunching numbers.
And it's not like the "progressive" universities aren't already jumping over themselves to hire women professors anytime they can.
You may be able to pay humans to solve them for you, but you can't pay humans to solve them for you at the same quantity. Human beings are slow and require extensive resources.
It makes a big difference when you're talking about creating a crime syndicate with thousands of employees vs. one lonely script kiddie. The former solution doesn't scale very well, and has a much higher barrier to entry. Even if you don't stop spam you are certainly cutting back on the quantity.
If they can break the captcha, that's a bit less helpful, because whoever did it can sell the solution. However, it's still better than if setting up an automated agent for spamming your site is nothing more than a scant few hours of work to anyone who can program. And the quicker you can change your captcha the less profitable/useful it becomes to crack it.
It's not about being utterly victorious. That would involve tracking down spammers and hiring hitmen to take them out. What it is about is harms mitigation, and captchas will still do that even after being broken.
That it's a blog is not really relevant if they verified it was the actual girl hosting the party making the claims. She could just as well have sent an email or made a podcast or even telephoned them herself. Direct testimony in any form is still direct testimony.
I see nothing wrong with republishing the direct claims of a person on how their own party went. The only way you should possibly be liable for libel is if you post something contradicting what they say when what they say happens to be true.
I mean, it's a freaking story about a party. You shouldn't need to send an investigative crime lab over to validate every assertion of the hostess.
If anything the only case the mom has is against her own daughter for slander.
The terrestrial abundance of gallium is 18 ppm. That comes to about 10^20 kg.
Now, I suppose you have done a case study demonstrating the insufficiency or economic infeasibility of accessing this material?
Or do you simply spend your time calling much more intelligent people "retards" for making valid and constructive contributions to ongoing discussions?
How can you possibly divorce statistics from game theory?
Your argument in a nutshell is: "If we optimize a counter-strategy, they will optimize their own counter-strategy, so we are better off leaving the status quo favorable to their present strategy." It's ridiculous. Should we stop associating bank robbers with people who walk into a bank with ski mask and gun on the premise that this will simply let robbers without ski masks and guns slip through undetected?
If you can isolate a subgroup that contains 85% of your "targets," it is simply logical that 85% of your resources should be dedicated to that particular subgroup. This has no similarity whatsoever to racism, which is the (contradicting) fallacy of replacing demographic weights with a general assumption of intrinsic character traits.
And you are quite mistaken to suggest terrorists have so much facility in choosing the demographic to cull recruits. Conscripting a suicide bomber is not like hiring a hitman. You need someone with the same ideological dogmatism that you have, and it is obviously a very small number of people who are caucasian muslims with an überfanatical willingness for martyrdom. There certainly are such people, no doubt about it, but not in high enough numbers that Al Qaeda could feasibly make a point of recruiting them. Until a larger caucasian demographic is represented under radical Islam, the only realistic way to generate a high number of such recruits would be to rear them specifically for the purpose, which is a long term and fairly precarious strategy. At present, there is absolutely no doubt profiling is *efficacious*, although please do note that I am not assuming that just because it is efficacious that it is *morally right*. You can still make against profiling even if it's known to make the best use of the available resources.
That is fine if sidewalks are treated as a lane for bicyclists, so that they're *always* wide enough to safely pass other pedestrians, not conspicuously disappearing whenever some person/business gets funny landscaping ideas, not blocked by the tail end of a car in whoever's driveway, telephone poles, or trashcans on trashday. Oh, and if after snow and ice they get plowed and salted. And the corner curbs are all sloped instead of sudden drop offs.
I don't see it as a matter of momentum. The difference in momentum between a tanker truck and a small car is easily comparable to the difference between a small car and a bicyclist. But you try riding down a cracked, icy, telephone pole/trashcan laden sometimes 18" sidewalk with sudden dropoffs and possibly uncovered water meter holes late at night and tell me you wouldn't much rather be riding twelve inches further on your left where the route is actually maintained and kept clear of obstacles.
Go some place like Albuqerque, there are bikepaths throughout the whole city. That at least is a viable solution, although you obviously still have to cross through roads etc. to get to the bike routes. But most places in the world sidewalks simply have not been designed with the foresight necessary to function as bikelanes. I'm guessing from your statement that you've never used a bike as a principal mode of transport.
Working from 8:30 - 3:00, 180 days a year, I don't see being "hell on your home life," even if you're doing as much work at home as you're assigning your students to do. (who have the same schedule as you, plus about a zillion sports and clubs)
I had exactly 1 teacher who spent time keeping up to date in her field. My AP teacher subscribed to and read an AP bio newsgroup. I don't think it took her 10 hours a week.
And I don't think anyone ever spent ten hours a week on paperwork. My honors english teachers might have spent 5 hours grading papers on the weeks major essays were due, and 10-15 the 1 time we had to do a major research paper.
They also get a 1 hour prep period, 50 min lunch, and 30 min homeroom during their 8 hour tenure in which they can be working on this.
The last place I lived the teachers were making 35-50k based on tier (three tiers) where the median income was 18k.
Not to mention that they get full health benefits, pensions plan, etc.
Yeah, I had some teachers (exactly 2) who would get up at 6 in the morning, stay three hours after school, give up their prep to teach another class that otherwise wouldn't get taught, and spent home time grading papers. Even then I'd say they were plenty compensated.
But most teachers used scantrons for grading tests, classtime/peer-grading for grading papers, and were out of the building practically before the students were. They couldn't have spent much time researching because they didn't know anything about what they were teaching... to the point that often times we noble honor students would have to help them out.
The only part of teaching truly invasive to your personal time is when you are first teaching a class and need to draft your lesson plan/materials. After that you just use the same stuff over again with slight modifications. And a lot of times teachers dodge even that bit by "inheriting" their lesson materials from another teacher.
It is a noble profession--on the condition that you make it one--but it is by no means a difficult or undercompensating one.
In tertiary education the teachers even find time to conduct major research projects coincident to their teaching job.
There are clearly a multitude of metrics by which you can assess the answer to your question.
Humanitarian: language translation / disability assistance software / tor.
Wanting to overthrow the evil empire: wine, firefox.
Wanting better hardware support: kernel developers.
Wanting to thank people: any projects you use/couldn't do without.
Really, it works best to just donate according to your own special favoritism. This way the projects get money in proportion to how much people/need want them. If you just wanted to pick the one project that will contribute the most to humanity, well, I can tell you already it's going to involve feeding hungry children and not improving your boot time.
If you like, you can imagine you are purchasing the software, and donate whatever is the highest price you would have been willing to pay for it (or at least use that to figure out the proportions in which you should divide your money).
(1) If you make divine attribution to your material, you de facto cede the copyright to it, because you've admitted you are not the actual author. Without a legal document signed by God, you just don't have any grounds to restrict it.
(2) In fact, it violates my religious freedom because how am I supposed to observe the dictates of the text (which I plausibly believe in) if I'm kept from reading it? It's one thing to ex-communicate people (which LDS actually has some court-ordered restrictions on now) but it is another to say they can't setup their own copy church either.
(3) If someone seriously has the secret key to salvation, it's unthinkable that the rest of us should perish in the fires of hell for lack of access to it. I'd saying doing so should open them to all sorts of lawsuits on behalf of the deceased for causing grievous post-mortem suffering.
(4) Copyright law is designed to encourage the authorship of works by creating an opportunity for profitable return. It is not designed so the feds can watch over your little secret society for you.
Your live cd has your security certificate. You have your password. Intercepting your password keystrokes will do no good unless they also steal your liveCD.
They could still have a setup to catch you, but at that level of paranoia you should be equally worried that they will be snooping the electric field of the computer.
Seriously, if your data is THAT sensitive which is to say THAT VALUABLE $$$, simply buying your own laptop is probably a very economic thing to do.
"Their access to user data raises significant civil liberties problems. They may be able to see more of your data than your friends or network members can â" and you also expose your friends' data when you add the application. All without needing a subpoena or warrant."
Alright, we obviously don't understand what either of these are.
A subpoena is a court order for information. If you are able to provide it and don't, there will be trouble. This doesn't mean such information can't be handed over voluntarily at any time.
A warrant grants a privilege to the police to forcibly obtain information they would otherwise not be allowed to obtain through force. But you don't need a warrant when you have cooperation.
The best example I could give probably is this: you need a warrant to tap someone's phone line. You *don't* need a warrant to put a microphone on an undercover agent and try to cajole the information out of the guy, or to bug a hotel room and arrange a meeting there, or to go knocking door to door at the guy's neighbors' houses making inquiries.
Your problem should be with "Facebook" who is currently selling out its homies to cash in as an informant.
It's no more problematic for free will if one knows what the choice will be beforehand than if one knows it after the fact. If my choices were random, that would be the opposite of free will, because then the chosen outcome would having nothing at all to do with my sense of self.
It's also not any kind of news that the physical properties of your brain relate to your choices. If I get amnesia I will make different decisions for wont of access to that previous domain of acquired knowledge than I would have otherwise.
The question is whether there is an entity to which the brain's data storage and processing capabilities are merely a tool--not whether these physical aspects of the brain exist and have effect. And the only way we will ever answer that question is to produce a full simulation of the brain.
It makes no practical difference whether the radius of detection is 1300 meters or 300 meters if the bees have a large flight path. (and flowers are not bordering on extinction)
The premise of this argument is that bees are unable to find flowers with a 300m radar system, which I believe to be intuitively absurd.
What we may be more concerned about is flowers that have been disproportionately diminished in their scent trails. These may wind up not being pollenated.
I don't know how many of you ever saw Dr. Starret try to write the lowercase Xi on the board, but it definitely qualifies as a unique artistic creation, as would pretty much anything else he wrote.
Now, if they were to print a typeset version in a recognizable font, then he would be fully justified in prosecuting them under the DMCA for circumventing a copy protection measure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm sure people making unapproved long distance calls has been at the front of DHS's security concerns, and their failure to anticipate the situation clearly indicates their inability to function successfully in any other capacity.
I have as many criticisms of the government as anyone else. But people who don't take the problems seriously are only half the issue. The other half is people like you who can relate a small technical problem which may not even be worth fixing (have you analyzed the cost to upgrade vs. the cost of the occasional prankster?) to every other criticism you have of the U.S. government.
Those of us with real concerns about government failings then have to fight to be taken seriously.
Depending on the specifics of what this guy's dealing with, he may be subject to rules regarding the safe disposal of certain chemicals, etc.
But the obvious fact is that he was not being persecuted under any of those regulations. The didn't see "vial x" and a think "this guy has too much of vial x, it is against the law." Or take a swab of his drain and say "this isn't being properly disposed of!"
What actually happened was that they decided to seize all of his crap so that they could look through it and find laws that he was in violation of. That's a definite NO. Should the police be able to drop by your house and raid all of your stuff on the same justification--"hey, maybe something in there is illegal."
Besides being a clear violation of constitutional protections, this seems a terrible attack on science. How many of the great chemists of history do you think could or would have started up if held to such limiting regulations?
I've watched a few episodes of cops where, after raiding a crack den or whatever, the cops then pose as the dealers and do a sting on everyone who buys the product. It seems like it should be similar here--raid the servers, and identify the clientÃle.
But the REALLY important thing, and I do mean the REALLY important thing, is to trackdown and rescue the exploited children. I'm okay with punishing people for participating in the distribution process; however, the reason we view it as so despicable is because of the value we place on the children involved, and our primary efforts should certainly be directed toward finding the source of child porn vs. find the recipients.
Um... haven't we had a bunch of articles on Slashdot about how the U.S. is *underproducing* science and engineering students?
It would be one thing if we had way too many and, for the available jobs, men were being unfairly selected over women. But when you have a general shortage how can you possibly increase the % women except for diminishing the quantity of men? Are they just going to fire people with Y chromosomes and leave their positions unfilled?
What I want to know is why it is apparently so abhorrent that women are going into fields like teaching, physical therapy, etc. instead of physics. Hero-complex aside, most people would much rather have these kinds of jobs than spend all day reading research papers and crunching numbers.
And it's not like the "progressive" universities aren't already jumping over themselves to hire women professors anytime they can.
You may be able to pay humans to solve them for you, but you can't pay humans to solve them for you at the same quantity. Human beings are slow and require extensive resources.
It makes a big difference when you're talking about creating a crime syndicate with thousands of employees vs. one lonely script kiddie. The former solution doesn't scale very well, and has a much higher barrier to entry. Even if you don't stop spam you are certainly cutting back on the quantity.
If they can break the captcha, that's a bit less helpful, because whoever did it can sell the solution. However, it's still better than if setting up an automated agent for spamming your site is nothing more than a scant few hours of work to anyone who can program. And the quicker you can change your captcha the less profitable/useful it becomes to crack it.
It's not about being utterly victorious. That would involve tracking down spammers and hiring hitmen to take them out. What it is about is harms mitigation, and captchas will still do that even after being broken.
That it's a blog is not really relevant if they verified it was the actual girl hosting the party making the claims. She could just as well have sent an email or made a podcast or even telephoned them herself. Direct testimony in any form is still direct testimony.
I see nothing wrong with republishing the direct claims of a person on how their own party went. The only way you should possibly be liable for libel is if you post something contradicting what they say when what they say happens to be true.
I mean, it's a freaking story about a party. You shouldn't need to send an investigative crime lab over to validate every assertion of the hostess.
If anything the only case the mom has is against her own daughter for slander.
The terrestrial abundance of gallium is 18 ppm. That comes to about 10^20 kg. Now, I suppose you have done a case study demonstrating the insufficiency or economic infeasibility of accessing this material? Or do you simply spend your time calling much more intelligent people "retards" for making valid and constructive contributions to ongoing discussions?
How can you possibly divorce statistics from game theory?
Your argument in a nutshell is: "If we optimize a counter-strategy, they will optimize their own counter-strategy, so we are better off leaving the status quo favorable to their present strategy." It's ridiculous. Should we stop associating bank robbers with people who walk into a bank with ski mask and gun on the premise that this will simply let robbers without ski masks and guns slip through undetected?
If you can isolate a subgroup that contains 85% of your "targets," it is simply logical that 85% of your resources should be dedicated to that particular subgroup. This has no similarity whatsoever to racism, which is the (contradicting) fallacy of replacing demographic weights with a general assumption of intrinsic character traits.
And you are quite mistaken to suggest terrorists have so much facility in choosing the demographic to cull recruits. Conscripting a suicide bomber is not like hiring a hitman. You need someone with the same ideological dogmatism that you have, and it is obviously a very small number of people who are caucasian muslims with an überfanatical willingness for martyrdom. There certainly are such people, no doubt about it, but not in high enough numbers that Al Qaeda could feasibly make a point of recruiting them. Until a larger caucasian demographic is represented under radical Islam, the only realistic way to generate a high number of such recruits would be to rear them specifically for the purpose, which is a long term and fairly precarious strategy. At present, there is absolutely no doubt profiling is *efficacious*, although please do note that I am not assuming that just because it is efficacious that it is *morally right*. You can still make against profiling even if it's known to make the best use of the available resources.
...playing airsoft. Do you think they sell bright red camo?
I don't see it as a matter of momentum. The difference in momentum between a tanker truck and a small car is easily comparable to the difference between a small car and a bicyclist. But you try riding down a cracked, icy, telephone pole/trashcan laden sometimes 18" sidewalk with sudden dropoffs and possibly uncovered water meter holes late at night and tell me you wouldn't much rather be riding twelve inches further on your left where the route is actually maintained and kept clear of obstacles.
Go some place like Albuqerque, there are bikepaths throughout the whole city. That at least is a viable solution, although you obviously still have to cross through roads etc. to get to the bike routes. But most places in the world sidewalks simply have not been designed with the foresight necessary to function as bikelanes. I'm guessing from your statement that you've never used a bike as a principal mode of transport.
Working from 8:30 - 3:00, 180 days a year, I don't see being "hell on your home life," even if you're doing as much work at home as you're assigning your students to do. (who have the same schedule as you, plus about a zillion sports and clubs)
I had exactly 1 teacher who spent time keeping up to date in her field. My AP teacher subscribed to and read an AP bio newsgroup. I don't think it took her 10 hours a week.
And I don't think anyone ever spent ten hours a week on paperwork. My honors english teachers might have spent 5 hours grading papers on the weeks major essays were due, and 10-15 the 1 time we had to do a major research paper.
They also get a 1 hour prep period, 50 min lunch, and 30 min homeroom during their 8 hour tenure in which they can be working on this.
The last place I lived the teachers were making 35-50k based on tier (three tiers) where the median income was 18k.
Not to mention that they get full health benefits, pensions plan, etc.
Yeah, I had some teachers (exactly 2) who would get up at 6 in the morning, stay three hours after school, give up their prep to teach another class that otherwise wouldn't get taught, and spent home time grading papers. Even then I'd say they were plenty compensated.
But most teachers used scantrons for grading tests, classtime/peer-grading for grading papers, and were out of the building practically before the students were. They couldn't have spent much time researching because they didn't know anything about what they were teaching... to the point that often times we noble honor students would have to help them out.
The only part of teaching truly invasive to your personal time is when you are first teaching a class and need to draft your lesson plan/materials. After that you just use the same stuff over again with slight modifications. And a lot of times teachers dodge even that bit by "inheriting" their lesson materials from another teacher.
It is a noble profession--on the condition that you make it one--but it is by no means a difficult or undercompensating one.
In tertiary education the teachers even find time to conduct major research projects coincident to their teaching job.
There are clearly a multitude of metrics by which you can assess the answer to your question.
Humanitarian: language translation / disability assistance software / tor.
Wanting to overthrow the evil empire: wine, firefox.
Wanting better hardware support: kernel developers.
Wanting to thank people: any projects you use/couldn't do without.
Really, it works best to just donate according to your own special favoritism. This way the projects get money in proportion to how much people/need want them. If you just wanted to pick the one project that will contribute the most to humanity, well, I can tell you already it's going to involve feeding hungry children and not improving your boot time.
If you like, you can imagine you are purchasing the software, and donate whatever is the highest price you would have been willing to pay for it (or at least use that to figure out the proportions in which you should divide your money).
(1) If you make divine attribution to your material, you de facto cede the copyright to it, because you've admitted you are not the actual author. Without a legal document signed by God, you just don't have any grounds to restrict it.
(2) In fact, it violates my religious freedom because how am I supposed to observe the dictates of the text (which I plausibly believe in) if I'm kept from reading it? It's one thing to ex-communicate people (which LDS actually has some court-ordered restrictions on now) but it is another to say they can't setup their own copy church either.
(3) If someone seriously has the secret key to salvation, it's unthinkable that the rest of us should perish in the fires of hell for lack of access to it. I'd saying doing so should open them to all sorts of lawsuits on behalf of the deceased for causing grievous post-mortem suffering.
(4) Copyright law is designed to encourage the authorship of works by creating an opportunity for profitable return. It is not designed so the feds can watch over your little secret society for you.
Your live cd has your security certificate. You have your password. Intercepting your password keystrokes will do no good unless they also steal your liveCD.
They could still have a setup to catch you, but at that level of paranoia you should be equally worried that they will be snooping the electric field of the computer.
Seriously, if your data is THAT sensitive which is to say THAT VALUABLE $$$, simply buying your own laptop is probably a very economic thing to do.
Alright, we obviously don't understand what either of these are.
A subpoena is a court order for information. If you are able to provide it and don't, there will be trouble. This doesn't mean such information can't be handed over voluntarily at any time.
A warrant grants a privilege to the police to forcibly obtain information they would otherwise not be allowed to obtain through force. But you don't need a warrant when you have cooperation.
The best example I could give probably is this: you need a warrant to tap someone's phone line. You *don't* need a warrant to put a microphone on an undercover agent and try to cajole the information out of the guy, or to bug a hotel room and arrange a meeting there, or to go knocking door to door at the guy's neighbors' houses making inquiries.
Your problem should be with "Facebook" who is currently selling out its homies to cash in as an informant.
It's no more problematic for free will if one knows what the choice will be beforehand than if one knows it after the fact. If my choices were random, that would be the opposite of free will, because then the chosen outcome would having nothing at all to do with my sense of self.
It's also not any kind of news that the physical properties of your brain relate to your choices. If I get amnesia I will make different decisions for wont of access to that previous domain of acquired knowledge than I would have otherwise.
The question is whether there is an entity to which the brain's data storage and processing capabilities are merely a tool--not whether these physical aspects of the brain exist and have effect. And the only way we will ever answer that question is to produce a full simulation of the brain.
It makes no practical difference whether the radius of detection is 1300 meters or 300 meters if the bees have a large flight path. (and flowers are not bordering on extinction) The premise of this argument is that bees are unable to find flowers with a 300m radar system, which I believe to be intuitively absurd. What we may be more concerned about is flowers that have been disproportionately diminished in their scent trails. These may wind up not being pollenated.
I don't know how many of you ever saw Dr. Starret try to write the lowercase Xi on the board, but it definitely qualifies as a unique artistic creation, as would pretty much anything else he wrote. Now, if they were to print a typeset version in a recognizable font, then he would be fully justified in prosecuting them under the DMCA for circumventing a copy protection measure.