The right to a laywer(if you received a NSL you literally could not talk to your laywer about it), the right to a fair hearing and trial by a jury of my peers, the (implied)right to privacy,freedom of association etc etc
absolutely. you have every right to pray in government buildings or schools. in fact in the case of schools the courts have consistently ruled that students' expressions of religious views through prayer or otherwise cannot be abridged unless they can be shown to cause substantial disruption in the school.
What you have absolutely no right to do is pressure other peoples children or other adults into praying in public buildings.
it's really easy to understand.
but religious nutjobs who just want to force everyone elses children to pray to whatever imaginary friend they happen to believe in love to lie and pretend it's banned.
similarly you can pray all you like in court but forcing anyone at all to take part or making it part of the official proceedings as if the religion is backed by the government isn't ok.
too bad the religious idiots are convinced that they can push their religion into official government affairs to try to get the government to back their religion over others or force the symbols or prayers of their own faith onto others.
there are rare cases where I'd be against punishing the soldiers or whoever who leaked info like specifically leaking small quantities of information revealing war crimes or extensive corruption. Essentially where the person in question genuinely has good reason to not trust that the propper official way of doing things will work at all.
in the case of whoever emptied half the US governments databases into wikileaks though that was far beyond anything reasonable, he very much committed a crime and should be punished.
Wikileaks and the other news sources who are publishing these documents though are doing absolutely nothing wrong. newspapers are supposed to reveal the embarasing information of the worlds rich and powerful and wikileaks seems to have brought some life back into the whole industry and reminded some of them what they're supposed to be doing.
luckily pets aren't people(cats excepted of course). My dog is free to go any time he wants, we don't lock him up. He could be up and away at a moments notice if he wanted yet every chance he gets he's in the door and curling up around our feet or crawling up on our laps.
Just give it time. So far all it indicates is that you're bad-idea-filter is of a high quality.
Pick a few unusual things to learn about, find some research topics and give yourself a crash course to the point where you have a half decent understanding up to the cutting edge and you'll start seeing loads of variations or new crossovers between various fields and some of them will probably be reasonable.
that and chat to people in fields far from your own and see what problems they have. cahnces are you'll see solutions from your own field to some of their problems.
Oh the gamedev forums get these things on an almost daily basis.
"oh I don't know any programming, I'm not an artist, I have nothing more than a hazy idea for a story,I have no experience but I have this idea and a hastily written half page of vague concepts and ideas and I'm willing to offer a 10% share of any profits to a team of coders, artists and designers who will help turn my vision into reality, I will of course get the other 90% as the ideas architect and central creative consultant"
There was one stickied there for months which was the perfect example of this sort of crap.
And the crazy thing is that these guys don't change as they get older and go through management and buisness courses. They think the *idea* is the hard part. That little spark of inspiration is 99% of what you need and everything else is just working out details. People with no tallent for coming up with good ideas and without the knowlegde to come up with practical ideas easily convince themselves that good ideas are somehow rare because they themselves are so bad at coming up with them.
The idea that for many people reasonably practical, good ideas are a monthly, weekly or even daily occourance seems strange to them and so they convince themselves that once they've had the idea they've done all the really hard work and everything else is worth only a fraction of their origional brilliant idea.
whitelisting can be a bigger sometimes though. I know when trying to figure out wierd application errors googling is generally the fastest way to find people who've had the same problem and how they've fixed it. I'd hate to be working on similar problems with a whitelist stopping me from viewing the thousands of tech support forums out there. I'd waste countless hours getting the same or worse info from documentation or trying to figure it out from scratch.
ever tried to work out what "assertion error 266" or whatever the cryptic error is without google? With google: 20 seconds. without google or the internet: 20 minutes to hours.
Actually characters are copyrightable under certain circumstances.
As indicated above, a character can exist merely by its textual description of that character. Who he or she is, what he or she looks like, the manner of behavior and other such characteristics can all be described, in writing, by the author. As such, the character may be protected under copyright law as part of the text of that work (see discussion below). Since one of the rights of copyright is the right to make derivative works based on the work, if there is such protection, the author (or whoever is the proprietor of the rights in and to the text including the character) retains the right to make further use of that character in such derivative works.
However, the character as described textually has to be protectable by copyright, meaning that it must have sufficient originality to satisfy the requirements of the statute. If the character as described is merely a "stock" character, there may not be sufficient originality to make the character protectable.
The character has to have some depth (not stock soldier number 3 etc) but characters are very much copyrightable as are fictional worlds. If you don't think the fictional worlds are then try commercially publishing a book based in the Star Trek or Star Wars universe and see how long it takes to get sued.
Fanfic sometimes simply gets ignored because many authors started out themselves writing fan fiction and they don't want to stop it. Some authors hate it with a passion.
The rules of a game cannot be copied.
You can make a game where a character goes around eating dots and being chased by ghosts which is identical to packman in every way as long as your character doesn't look too much like the origional though it might depend on whether the pacman character is significant enough to fall under copyright given that it's simply a circle with a wedge cut out.
but if you closely copy the art(like drawing the character yourself but making it almost identical), characters, story or world(assuming it's significant enough to be covered by copyright and I'd guess that the simple maze in pacman probably wouldn't be enough) then you can fall foul of copyright. And as for names avoid anything that is too close to the origional or contains part of the origionals name.
I've worked as a demonstrator and tutor a lot and I'd barelly class what I tell my friend teaching. Teaching would be sitting down with someone for an hour and going through the material they're struggling with. They know what they have to learn, they know where to get it but just can't understand it.
this is more like telling someone of the existance of an area of study and coming back to find they've taught most of the damn thing to themselves while you weren't looking.
It's more the aspect of knowing that there's something there to find out. unless you know what hash functions are it's hard to know such things exist. If you've never heard of abstract data types it's hard to jump from slow code to know what to look for.
you could ask "My code is slow, why" but unless you know what to look for there's a lot of possible answers.
He actually didn't do well in college though he was doing chemistry rather than CS, the structure and boredom got to him.
Jon Schillaci doesn't seem quite as nice as you make out. He was jailed for raping some kids then after a family who were far too trusting took him in he abused the trust they had for some reason show in him when he repeatidly molested their 5 year old.
10 Most Wanted seems a bit much but that fucker deserved jail.
When the barn door is swinging open and the pigs have fled don't turn your nose up at offers of getting bacon returned to you simply because accepting it would imply approving people eating your escaped pigs. Take what you can get and accept that you should have locked the barn door because you're never catching those pigs no matter how much you scream and stamp your feet.
One of them is a college dropout who works all hours. He's one of those busy people, you know the ones, from the saying "if you need something done give it to someone who's busy"
I mentioned 1 way hashes to him over a pint when we were chatting about a problem he was having in work to do with checking for duplicate details without violating data protection. A few weeks later I chat to him and he's educated himself about hash functions beyond what would be covered in a CS degree.
I sat down with him one afternoon and went through the basics of how to write a simple "hello world" program and compile it and how to do simple loops. just enough to get past the "where do I start" bit with coding. 6 months later he's writing applications for his office.
I mentioned data structures and various search algortihms to him when he was talking about how his code was always far far slower than the professional coders stuff. I fully expect him to find out next time I talk to him that he's gone off and educated himself about datastructures and algorithms beyond what a normal cs course covers.
He'll go far in life... or, considering the workload he takes on, go nuts.... but probably go far in life. He has the tallent and drive to educate himself while working 2 jobs and isn't afraid of learning.
by that standard nobody has ever started a war ever.
Did Austria-Hungary start world war 1? Nope. the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalist did. which is of course crap and just an excuse but that's how politics works. Did the US start the United States occupation of Haiti? Nope. the uppity locals threatened American business interests. etc etc
there is always an excuse. Always. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian not afghani.
Of course, on nearly all of the other cases, it was larger nations invading smaller nations and our standing up for them.
how noble that sounds. It even sounds reasonable as long as you ignore how many such situations get totally ignored because it's nations the US gets on with doing it.
then someone just extracts the public key, create a new hash for the edited image and stuff it in metadata. this suffers from the same problem as copy protection, you have to give the user everything they need to create an arbitrary image and they will always be able to take the hardware apart.
unless you want to pass it through a third party(who can still only verify date and time it was passed through their servers) there's not much you can do on the camera that's foolproof.
There's quite a large numbers of methods for detecting if an image is tampered or not though. Some of them rely on sensor noise in the camera, some on natural image statistics, some on looking for chromatic aberration or slight aberrations in how a particular camera model encodes an image.
I studied this for my final year project and came to the conclusion that if given a high quality raw image along with the camera it was claimed to have been taken with and given enough time to take a lot of test images with the camera in question it's extremely possible to decide to a high degree of certainty whether the image has been tampered with.
You can make it far far harder by not stretching or scaling anything, taking anything you're inserting from an image taken with the same camera in the same part of the image (not swapping left to right), never compressing anything in a lossy way until you've got the final image, not getting any source images or elements from anything which has ever been compressed in a lossy fashion like jpeg, making sure that specular highlights and shadows match exactly and that the scale of everything is exactly right though there can still be some clues left by the editing tool and by the presence or lack of imperfections caused by errors in the camera like slight lens aberrations.
It takes quite a bit of work but it can be done and there are suits of tools made available to law enforcement. That's without any signing which is a fairly weak method unless you can snap the image and push it through the signing authority fast enough that you couldn't reasonably claim anyone had time to edit it since the event.
It can't but if at some point in the future you want to get a job which requires any kind of clearance they can refuse it based on whatever they feel like. Including the fact that someone accessed wikileaks or read the ny times from your home IP address.
thing is that this wouldn't be quite like striking gold.
Sunlight is everywhere but the sahara is just an unusually good place. What it would provide is high level jobs and income. If anyone asses around too much and blows things up then the qualified people leave or the solar panels get broken/blown up and the resource goes away.
yes but at the same time there's part of a point there. namely:
*who the hell are you to decide if my life isn't worth living* Or in the case of animals you can't communicate with- killing them can be more about what you want and what you feel than about what the animals wants or feel. It makes you feel better to no longer see it suffering, the animal on the other hand may be quite determined to keep living.
Don't you see man! It's like slavery! thinking you can "own" an animal. We can't "own" our animal equals! keeping a pet is so like exactly the same as slavery!
or something absurd like that.
either way everyone knows: dogs have owners, cats have staff.
Slashdot Mirror
not really.
for a surprisingly large percentage of children daddy isn't really the daddy.
As the reproductive biologist Jack Cohen said
"women 'sin downwards' for sex and 'sin upwards in status' for having children"
ie: marry upwards but have sex with the hot delivery guy.
both sexes do it plenty.
Thanks to the patriot act...
The right to a laywer(if you received a NSL you literally could not talk to your laywer about it), the right to a fair hearing and trial by a jury of my peers, the (implied)right to privacy,freedom of association etc etc
anyone else want to chime in with some more?
absolutely. you have every right to pray in government buildings or schools.
in fact in the case of schools the courts have consistently ruled that students' expressions of religious views through prayer or otherwise cannot be abridged unless they can be shown to cause substantial disruption in the school.
What you have absolutely no right to do is pressure other peoples children or other adults into praying in public buildings.
it's really easy to understand.
but religious nutjobs who just want to force everyone elses children to pray to whatever imaginary friend they happen to believe in love to lie and pretend it's banned.
similarly you can pray all you like in court but forcing anyone at all to take part or making it part of the official proceedings as if the religion is backed by the government isn't ok.
too bad the religious idiots are convinced that they can push their religion into official government affairs to try to get the government to back their religion over others or force the symbols or prayers of their own faith onto others.
there are rare cases where I'd be against punishing the soldiers or whoever who leaked info like specifically leaking small quantities of information revealing war crimes or extensive corruption.
Essentially where the person in question genuinely has good reason to not trust that the propper official way of doing things will work at all.
in the case of whoever emptied half the US governments databases into wikileaks though that was far beyond anything reasonable, he very much committed a crime and should be punished.
Wikileaks and the other news sources who are publishing these documents though are doing absolutely nothing wrong.
newspapers are supposed to reveal the embarasing information of the worlds rich and powerful and wikileaks seems to have brought some life back into the whole industry and reminded some of them what they're supposed to be doing.
luckily pets aren't people(cats excepted of course).
My dog is free to go any time he wants, we don't lock him up.
He could be up and away at a moments notice if he wanted yet every chance he gets he's in the door and curling up around our feet or crawling up on our laps.
Just give it time.
So far all it indicates is that you're bad-idea-filter is of a high quality.
Pick a few unusual things to learn about, find some research topics and give yourself a crash course to the point where you have a half decent understanding up to the cutting edge and you'll start seeing loads of variations or new crossovers between various fields and some of them will probably be reasonable.
that and chat to people in fields far from your own and see what problems they have.
cahnces are you'll see solutions from your own field to some of their problems.
no no, he knows too much about their dirty laundry now.
Oh the gamedev forums get these things on an almost daily basis.
"oh I don't know any programming, I'm not an artist, I have nothing more than a hazy idea for a story,I have no experience but I have this idea and a hastily written half page of vague concepts and ideas and I'm willing to offer a 10% share of any profits to a team of coders, artists and designers who will help turn my vision into reality, I will of course get the other 90% as the ideas architect and central creative consultant"
There was one stickied there for months which was the perfect example of this sort of crap.
And the crazy thing is that these guys don't change as they get older and go through management and buisness courses.
They think the *idea* is the hard part.
That little spark of inspiration is 99% of what you need and everything else is just working out details.
People with no tallent for coming up with good ideas and without the knowlegde to come up with practical ideas easily convince themselves that good ideas are somehow rare because they themselves are so bad at coming up with them.
The idea that for many people reasonably practical, good ideas are a monthly, weekly or even daily occourance seems strange to them and so they convince themselves that once they've had the idea they've done all the really hard work and everything else is worth only a fraction of their origional brilliant idea.
whitelisting can be a bigger sometimes though.
I know when trying to figure out wierd application errors googling is generally the fastest way to find people who've had the same problem and how they've fixed it.
I'd hate to be working on similar problems with a whitelist stopping me from viewing the thousands of tech support forums out there.
I'd waste countless hours getting the same or worse info from documentation or trying to figure it out from scratch.
ever tried to work out what "assertion error 266" or whatever the cryptic error is without google?
With google: 20 seconds.
without google or the internet: 20 minutes to hours.
Actually characters are copyrightable under certain circumstances.
As indicated above, a character can exist merely by its textual description of that character. Who he or she is, what he or she looks like, the manner of behavior and other such characteristics can all be described, in writing, by the author. As such, the character may be protected under copyright law as part of the text of that work (see discussion below). Since one of the rights of copyright is the right to make derivative works based on the work, if there is such protection, the author (or whoever is the proprietor of the rights in and to the text including the character) retains the right to make further use of that character in such derivative works.
However, the character as described textually has to be protectable by copyright, meaning that it must have sufficient originality to satisfy the requirements of the statute. If the character as described is merely a "stock" character, there may not be sufficient originality to make the character protectable.
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/characters.html
The character has to have some depth (not stock soldier number 3 etc)
but characters are very much copyrightable as are fictional worlds.
If you don't think the fictional worlds are then try commercially publishing a book based in the Star Trek or Star Wars universe and see how long it takes to get sued.
Fanfic sometimes simply gets ignored because many authors started out themselves writing fan fiction and they don't want to stop it.
Some authors hate it with a passion.
The rules of a game cannot be copied.
You can make a game where a character goes around eating dots and being chased by ghosts which is identical to packman in every way as long as your character doesn't look too much like the origional though it might depend on whether the pacman character is significant enough to fall under copyright given that it's simply a circle with a wedge cut out.
but if you closely copy the art(like drawing the character yourself but making it almost identical), characters, story or world(assuming it's significant enough to be covered by copyright and I'd guess that the simple maze in pacman probably wouldn't be enough) then you can fall foul of copyright.
And as for names avoid anything that is too close to the origional or contains part of the origionals name.
I've worked as a demonstrator and tutor a lot and I'd barelly class what I tell my friend teaching.
Teaching would be sitting down with someone for an hour and going through the material they're struggling with.
They know what they have to learn, they know where to get it but just can't understand it.
this is more like telling someone of the existance of an area of study and coming back to find they've taught most of the damn thing to themselves while you weren't looking.
It's more the aspect of knowing that there's something there to find out.
unless you know what hash functions are it's hard to know such things exist.
If you've never heard of abstract data types it's hard to jump from slow code to know what to look for.
you could ask "My code is slow, why" but unless you know what to look for there's a lot of possible answers.
He actually didn't do well in college though he was doing chemistry rather than CS, the structure and boredom got to him.
Jon Schillaci doesn't seem quite as nice as you make out.
He was jailed for raping some kids then after a family who were far too trusting took him in he abused the trust they had for some reason show in him when he repeatidly molested their 5 year old.
10 Most Wanted seems a bit much but that fucker deserved jail.
When the barn door is swinging open and the pigs have fled don't turn your nose up at offers of getting bacon returned to you simply because accepting it would imply approving people eating your escaped pigs.
Take what you can get and accept that you should have locked the barn door because you're never catching those pigs no matter how much you scream and stamp your feet.
Hell yes.
I know 2 or 3 people like this.
One of them is a college dropout who works all hours.
He's one of those busy people, you know the ones, from the saying "if you need something done give it to someone who's busy"
I mentioned 1 way hashes to him over a pint when we were chatting about a problem he was having in work to do with checking for duplicate details without violating data protection.
A few weeks later I chat to him and he's educated himself about hash functions beyond what would be covered in a CS degree.
I sat down with him one afternoon and went through the basics of how to write a simple "hello world" program and compile it and how to do simple loops.
just enough to get past the "where do I start" bit with coding.
6 months later he's writing applications for his office.
I mentioned data structures and various search algortihms to him when he was talking about how his code was always far far slower than the professional coders stuff.
I fully expect him to find out next time I talk to him that he's gone off and educated himself about datastructures and algorithms beyond what a normal cs course covers.
He'll go far in life... or, considering the workload he takes on, go nuts.... but probably go far in life.
He has the tallent and drive to educate himself while working 2 jobs and isn't afraid of learning.
by that standard nobody has ever started a war ever.
Did Austria-Hungary start world war 1? Nope. the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalist did.
which is of course crap and just an excuse but that's how politics works.
Did the US start the United States occupation of Haiti? Nope. the uppity locals threatened American business interests.
etc etc
there is always an excuse.
Always.
Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian not afghani.
Of course, on nearly all of the other cases, it was larger nations invading smaller nations and our standing up for them.
how noble that sounds.
It even sounds reasonable as long as you ignore how many such situations get totally ignored because it's nations the US gets on with doing it.
then someone just extracts the public key, create a new hash for the edited image and stuff it in metadata.
this suffers from the same problem as copy protection, you have to give the user everything they need to create an arbitrary image and they will always be able to take the hardware apart.
unless you want to pass it through a third party(who can still only verify date and time it was passed through their servers) there's not much you can do on the camera that's foolproof.
There's quite a large numbers of methods for detecting if an image is tampered or not though.
Some of them rely on sensor noise in the camera, some on natural image statistics, some on looking for chromatic aberration or slight aberrations in how a particular camera model encodes an image.
I studied this for my final year project and came to the conclusion that if given a high quality raw image along with the camera it was claimed to have been taken with and given enough time to take a lot of test images with the camera in question it's extremely possible to decide to a high degree of certainty whether the image has been tampered with.
You can make it far far harder by not stretching or scaling anything, taking anything you're inserting from an image taken with the same camera in the same part of the image (not swapping left to right), never compressing anything in a lossy way until you've got the final image, not getting any source images or elements from anything which has ever been compressed in a lossy fashion like jpeg, making sure that specular highlights and shadows match exactly and that the scale of everything is exactly right though there can still be some clues left by the editing tool and by the presence or lack of imperfections caused by errors in the camera like slight lens aberrations.
It takes quite a bit of work but it can be done and there are suits of tools made available to law enforcement.
That's without any signing which is a fairly weak method unless you can snap the image and push it through the signing authority fast enough that you couldn't reasonably claim anyone had time to edit it since the event.
It can't but if at some point in the future you want to get a job which requires any kind of clearance they can refuse it based on whatever they feel like. Including the fact that someone accessed wikileaks or read the ny times from your home IP address.
This needs more love:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
thing is that this wouldn't be quite like striking gold.
Sunlight is everywhere but the sahara is just an unusually good place.
What it would provide is high level jobs and income.
If anyone asses around too much and blows things up then the qualified people leave or the solar panels get broken/blown up and the resource goes away.
yes but at the same time there's part of a point there.
namely:
*who the hell are you to decide if my life isn't worth living*
Or in the case of animals you can't communicate with- killing them can be more about what you want and what you feel than about what the animals wants or feel.
It makes you feel better to no longer see it suffering, the animal on the other hand may be quite determined to keep living.
Don't you see man! It's like slavery! thinking you can "own" an animal.
We can't "own" our animal equals!
keeping a pet is so like exactly the same as slavery!
or something absurd like that.
either way everyone knows: dogs have owners, cats have staff.
What are you talking about?
Pretty much everyone produces emails, facebook updates and innane comments.
And anyone using the net produces packets as a matter of course.
The government however is *not* responsible for licensing people to communicate with each other over the internet.
And it should not be.
the day you need a liscence to have the privaliage of talking to other people is the day that free speach is well and truely dead and burried.