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User: Free+the+Cowards

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  1. Re:illegally obtained evidence on Gov't Database Errors Leading To Unconstitutional Searches? · · Score: 1

    If wrongfully obtained evidence is still admissible then the term loses all meaning.

    Right now there are two things that stop police from wrongfully gathering evidence. One is that such evidence is not admissible, and thus not very useful to them. And one is that it's illegal, and they can go to jail for it.

    The second thing is worthless. Ever hear of a police officer who went to jail because of how he gathered evidence? Didn't think so. Police and prosecutors are on the same side. Do you think a prosecutor, whose political success depends on his ability to put criminals in jail, is going to bite the hand that feeds hims all this wonderful juicy evidence? No way.

    So from a practical matter, the inadmissibility of wrongfully gathered evidence is the only thing that keeps officers from busting into your home based on rumor, hearsay, or a hunch, and then searching the place until they find something illegal.

  2. Re:illegally obtained evidence on Gov't Database Errors Leading To Unconstitutional Searches? · · Score: 1

    Simple, don't want legal problems, don't fuck up. Bottom line. Not that their isn't a bunch of people wrongfully incarcerated, but the majority DESERVE it.

    That's a nice contradiction there. It boggles my mind how you could even write a thing. If there are a bunch of wrongfully incarcerated prisoners, then it's not as "simple" as you state. If you don't want legal problems, don't fuck up, hope you don't fuck up by accident (ever broken a law you didn't know was there? Remember that ignorance of the law is never an excuse), and hope that somebody with power doesn't decide you fucked up even though you didn't. Not as friendly as your "bottom line", but a whole lot more accurate.

  3. Re:Linux is too big to be secure. on Will ParanoidLinux Protect the Truly Paranoid? · · Score: 1

    Why stop there? Why assume that your CPU is secure? The truly paranoid don't trust any computer they didn't build themselves from transistors.

  4. Re:This is why the Microsoft monoculture is bad on Netbook Return Rates Much Higher For Linux Than Windows · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure that you've ever seen a normal person. Most people encounter extreme difficulty when presented with a DVD player or washing machine with which they are unfamiliar. And those devices are literally millions of times less complex than a computer. These people who were computer-literate in general and could pick up a new OS without too much difficulty were the sorts of computer nerds who install Linux and argue about which distro is better and brag about how their OpenBSD box has been up for three years straight. The general population wasn't using computers back in the competitive heyday, and to the extent that they were it was in a pretty rote fashion, filling out forms or following instructions printed out for them.

  5. Asshole on Getting Paid To Abandon an Open Source Project? · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    "Since you support free speech, I assume that you support and encourage flag burning."

    A true advocate for freedom will advocate for the freedom to do things that he personally does not approve of.

  6. Re:The projected costs are worthless. on The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps · · Score: 1

    128kbps is extremely high quality, though. A standard phone line is only 64kbps and that's before applying any compression. 128kbps is enough to give CD quality, way more than you need for voice quality.

  7. Re:Yay! on iPhone Antitrust and Computer Fraud Claims Upheld · · Score: 1

    If you're trying to make a point, you're doing it in an incredibly stupid fashion. I never said the iPhone's AT&T exclusive contract was something in any way unique.

  8. Re:Yay! on iPhone Antitrust and Computer Fraud Claims Upheld · · Score: 5, Informative

    What gives is that they're talking about Apple's contract with AT&T, not your contract with AT&T. The reason you can't buy an iPhone and use it with T-Mobile in the US (unless you hack it) is because of Apple's exclusive contract, which currently runs for five years.

  9. Re:Again, this is EXACTLY what they said about che on 16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress · · Score: 1

    I was talking about GPUs. Of course the numbers don't completely match up, but the point is that last decade's ultra-specialized supercomputer is this decade's beige-box PC. Less, even.

    Additionally, with CUDA and the like now available, I don't see any reason why a GPU couldn't be used for a chess engine. The kind of deep game-tree searching they use is pretty much inherently parallel. No doubt it would take a lot of work (and would probably not be worthwhile compared to improving the existing algorithms on normal CPUs) but I don't see why it couldn't be done.

  10. Re:Boring on 16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress · · Score: 1

    Incidentally it's also partly why I stopped playing. I enjoy the game but have no patience for memorization.

    Interestingly, I think that Fischer's version of chess would have the computers doing even better against humans than they already are. The number of variants is small, only 960. It's more than high enough to offer a great impediment to memorization for humans, which was its purpose, but for a computer to precalculate all the openings on a thousand different games versus just one is not really very difficult. So the computers would still have their gigantic opening libraries but the humans would be stuck without them.

  11. Re:Again, this is EXACTLY what they said about che on 16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress · · Score: 1

    Deep Blue was capable of 11.38 gigaflops in 1997.

    You can go to the store and buy an off-the-shelf PC today which will do 2 teraflops.

    The fact that a standard desktop PC can best Deep Blue has little to do with "insight" and everything to do with Moore's Law.

  12. Re:I work in the power industry on Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says · · Score: 1

    Cost is only a problem because of, again, politics. Nuclear power is not inherently more expensive than other forms of power. Safe nuclear power isn't even inherently more expensive. The reason no more nuclear power plants are being built in the US is because it's impossible to get regulatory approval for using anything beyond 1960s technology, and basically impossible to get regulatory approval for new construction at all.

  13. Re:Denied it? You bet. on Toxic Fumes From Mac Pros? · · Score: 1

    Well the sad thing is that, at least in the US, the positions I described are "lefty". The right is so knee-jerk stupid here that they are against saving money through good gas mileage, recycling, and against doing the sane thing by saving the planet simply because the left is for it all.

  14. Re:I work in the power industry on Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says · · Score: 1

    Current costs of uranium are well below the cost for coal in terms of dollars per MWh, and far below the cost for other hydrocarbons. Given the small rate of usage it's unlikely to undergo an oil-like cost explosion anytime in the foreseeable future.

    As far as the economics go, there are indications that political impossibility of nuclear power is already changing. I wouldn't be surprised to see new nuke plants begin construction in the US within 5-10 years.

    There is not going to be a single magical panacea to the energy problem. Wind, solar, nuclear, and all the rest will all be useful. No one of them can do it alone (although nuclear comes very close, politics aside) but with all alternatives working together, hydrocarbon-based energy can be substantially eliminated in a practical fashion.

  15. Re:Denied it? You bet. on Toxic Fumes From Mac Pros? · · Score: 1

    Totally agree. Greenpeace seems to be of the "by any means necessary" school of thought, and from what I've read about them are absolutely not above reporting negligible concentrations as dangerous, implying falsehoods, and even outright faking data. Worse than useless.

    As an aside, your "lefty" list makes me kind of sad. I don't count myself as either left or right, just rational. But "high gas mileage" and "recycle" are just plain common sense, not some kind of political agenda. And "save the planet" can be taken to simply mean "don't shit in your own bed", which is also just plain common sense. It's a sad commentary on the state of politics when such obvious things get considered as "lefty".

  16. Re:Open source on Skype Messages Monitored In China · · Score: 1

    But good security may well require extra steps on behalf of the user.

    Take for example something like OTR. OTR can be completely secure if used correctly, but correct use requires verifying other people's fingerprints and such. Blindly clicking through the security dialogs destroys the security of the system. Zfone is another good example of this. In these cases your grandparents could use the same app, but their use won't be secure even if your use is.

    More generally, I'm not sure that a system can be made usable to completely clueless people and still remain secure for all involved. It's a great goal, and you can probably do better with it than what we have now, but I don't know that it can be achieved in general.

    And more realistically it's quite likely that the super friendly video chat app your grandparents use is going to be insecure, and the super secure chat app you use for political subversion is going to be user unfriendly, just because that's how people tend to make them.

  17. Re:Are vapor cars cannibalizing current car sales? on Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says · · Score: 1

    Maybe they've just realized that buying a new car every two years is a great way to waste a huge heaping pile of money for not very much gain.

  18. Re:I work in the power industry on Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nuclear is not comparable to oil because the quantity of substance needed and expelled is literally millions of times less.

    There is enough Uranium on the planet to run modern civilization for many millennia. And waste is a trivial problem which does not deserve all of the attention it gets. France has similar nuclear generation capacity to the US but is a much smaller country (75% of their electricity is nuclear), and you don't see a looming French nuclear waste disposal problem.

    The current problems with nuclear power are all political. Uranium supply is not a problem. Construction of new plants is only a problem because it's politically impossible. Waste is only a problem because waste reprocessing is politically impossible.

  19. Re:NTSB? on Fossett's Plane Found · · Score: 1

    Because the lessons learned from his crash can save the lives of others. If it was a mechanical defect, the details of that defect need to be made known. If it was a mistake on his part, then knowing what that mistake was can help others to avoid it.

  20. Re:My experience that day on Fossett's Plane Found · · Score: 1

    Any glider pilot with half a clue who values his life at all will stay the hell away from anything that looks like a thunderstorm.

  21. Re:He's still kicking! on Fossett's Plane Found · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe he found several thousand, and decided to turn in enough to be realistic.

  22. Re:It's a hoax, people. on Hikers May Have Found Fossett Items · · Score: 1

    Good point about the certificate number. I hadn't realized this, but it appears that you are indeed correct.

  23. Re:Uh ... on Towards a Wiki For Formally Verified Mathematics · · Score: 1

    I'm glad we resolved our differences. As for formal verification, I don't know a great deal about it, but my understanding is that with this wiki, the human is still responsible for writing out the proof in fairly exacting detail, and the computer just makes sure that each step logically and directly follows from the previous ones. The process is made easier by allowing the use of previously-verified theorems rather than having to spell out every step down to the axioms, like calling subroutines in a program. Whether the existing programs are able to encompass all of mathematical knowledge is something I couldn't say.

    Anyway, I don't know about the technical feasibility of the project, although the founders (obviously) seem to think it's doable. My only objection is to those who think that a simple "Godel" is enough to sink it.

  24. Re:Open source on Skype Messages Monitored In China · · Score: 1

    I'd suggest that the app you use for politically-dangerous discussion and the app you use to do video chat with your grandparents should probably not be the same app.

    Unless of course your grandparents are politically active and the video chat with them is the politically-dangerous discussion. But in that case, hopefully they retain enough flexibility of mind to learn something less user friendly.

  25. Re:Uh ... on Towards a Wiki For Formally Verified Mathematics · · Score: 1

    Let's back up a moment. All I've been saying about Godel's theorem is that it doesn't have anything to do with the question of whether this wiki's goal makes sense. I assert merely that if a piece of mathematical knowledge is truly known, then it has a proof, and that if it has a real proof then that proof can be checked by a machine.

    Since humans are machines, this would seem to be true in a very obvious way.

    If I am wrong, please elucidate.