Wow. This is begging - begging! - for a big fat stack of social engineering. You can fake being an FBI man and get into the library records of anyone you want. They're under gag order and they know it, so they won't look into it at all. Just run a line on the librarian about the Patriot Act and federal felony charges if they do anything to breach the secrecy of the inquiry, including looking into it. Even casual checking might reveal to the librarian that they're getting conned, but they can't check, or if they do check they have to do all the checking themselves without telling anyone why! Throw in some bullshit about how open phone lines arn't regarded as secure, and you can convince them that they can't even call the FBI to check your id!
Christmas comes early this year for the black hats! How many other gag orders like this exist under the patriot act? How many people are hindered in finding out if inquiries are coming from a valid source? How many shady groups are already using this enviornment of secrecy to reach thier nefarious ends?
Rumor has it that Oregon has made some kinds of suicide legal. I don't know what that has done to Oregon's suicide rate, but I'm sure it's a checkable statistic (that I'm too lazy to Google up).
Irrelevant, come to think of it. People heading there to off themselves would throw off the statistics.
I suspect your choice of suicide as a comparison to marijuana, heroin, ethanol, or nicotine is likewise flawed. Suicide is not normally seen (or felt) as desireable, even by the infinitesimally small minority who actually commit suicide. On the other hand, most heroin, ethanol, nicotine, or marijuana users see those drugs as highly desireable.
That's essentially the core of my original point. Drugs zap the pleasure center of your brain, directly or indirectly, and thus usage rises regardless of laws. Suicide doesn't zap the pleasure center. Neither does Linux. You state, without evidence, that linux becoming illegal will increase it's use. I invite you to prove this statement instead of just saying it in many different ways.
The problem with "goals" in legislation is that they are almost always unattainable. In the case of drugs (or crypto'd Linux), the goal is to reduce the usage of something the government doesn't like, but the result is the growth of that usage far beyond what it would have been had the government kept its busybody fingers to itself and let the people make their own choices and take personal responsibility for those choices.
I'm worried that you're just repeating retoric, which makes me feel like I'm talking/dev/null.
Demonstrating that making something illegal causes growth is far from trivial. Lots of factors affect growth. It doesn't help that drug use for any given drug is largely untracked. But if we take cocaine as an example, usage per capita has plummeted since it became illegal - because cocaine used to be used in medicines and beverages sold over the counter, so you could become a user by buying the wrong soda. It's my guess that drug use depends a lot more on other factors than legality.
Banning crypto is like banning crack. Or worse. It's a lot easier to get crypto that works well (gpg, pgp, openssl, openssh) anywhere in the world with a phone connection, than it is to get crack, and crytpo costs a lot less. Banning crypto just makes it more obvious that governments are populated by a bunch of clueless idiots who have no idea what they're doing and no understanding of the consequences thereof.
That's great copy but it's pretty much irrelevant to what we're talking about.
I'm not sure... I think there's a flaw in your argument somewhere. I think the profit made by linux vendors would improve from the artifical scarcity of a black market. I think that people would think of guys in outfits out of the Matrix when they thought of Linux users, instead of fat guys with beards. I think Linux would become more widely known.
But, would banning Linux actually cause more users? Somehow I doubt it. If we find a jurisdiction where suicide isn't illegal and make it so, then we're not going to see a doubling of suicide rates or anything like that. (Note to self. Is there a jurisdiction where suicide is legal? This would be... interesting... to test.) The goal of legislation is to repress the growth in usage of something the government doesn't want you to use. The legislation didn't cause the growth - it just failed to stop it. The growth is already there, as the law generally does not legislate truly fringe elements. (For instance, there are plenty of drugs that you can get by mail order now that are at least as 'druggy' as marajuana and lsd, but they arn't illegal because of the exceptional minority of users.)
How in the world are old-money interests going to retain control over all of the new-economy ventures if new ventures have the ability to start up without old-money funds? This is a blow to our old-money controlled capitalist-worshipping way of life and must be stopped as soon as possible! Someone call Dubya and have him send in the BATF after these commie hippies!
The robot can also upload everything it hears and sees to the Internet. Say you're staying late at work and want to make sure your kids are doing their homework, Xie said. You can direct the robot around your house, find your kids and check up on them by viewing the robot's video online.
I'm sure my childhood would have been loads better if a robot stalked me through the hallways.
You have to learn entirely different programming methods to program algorithms to run in parallel. Managing memory and cache access between multiple processors is a pain in the ass on the hardware side. That's what makes mobos for multiple processors more expensive. Plus, some tasks are just not well-suited to scaling across multiple processors at all.
In short, I'd rather have a one processor machine over a two or more processor machine if the one processor machine gives sufficient speed for a reasonable price.
when I was little
on
ECCp-109 Solved
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When I was little, I loved to write computer programs that would count. They'd start at one and count upward, and I'd keep track of when it gained decimil places.
Pointless, right? Well, does this cryptography cracking have a point? We know that the algorithm will be cracked when the right key is hit. It's just as much electrowanking as jumping up and down when your computer counts to a million, with a bit of cryptography politics thrown in.
I don't get why people are drwan to these projects over more significant problems like OGM or protein folding.
This here is press-men deciding which places are best for the press to do buisness in. In other words, can you report what you see without going to jail? That's thier bit. Read the bottom. They help reporters in jail.
I imagine it completely neglects many things that we consider *very* important for press freedom. I imagine they close thier eyes to internal buisness politics and the media owners themselves. After all, they are reporters. They think they are the bastion for the free spread of information, yet look at the newspapers! Really look at the fucking newspapers. They parrot Reuters. That's it. The censorship that they do, that they learned to do to rise in thier profession (troublesome reporters who hinder sales *do* *not* *rise*), that thier bosses do, is a giant blind spot. Investigative reporting is dead - and they and thier bosses let it die - and they're running around pretending that the US sticking a couple of people in jail for tresspassing is a serious factor in the fucked up new-speak trash that passes as journalism around the world compared to the fact that Monsano can kill a story with a fucking phone call!
All of the US government repression in the world is a drop in the fucking bucket compared to the simple fact that every time you find a reporter who broke a real story, big news, better than 50 percent of the time he lost his job. Journalists repressed by the government? Fuck that. The press destroyed itself.
If the press were doing investigative journalism, if the journalists had skills at finding the stories (and wern't fired for doing so) - then it would be an uphill battle for the internet to brush aside the newspapers as a media source. Since journalism is dead, probably never existed in the way we think of it (hasn't it always been about getting people to buy large square sheets of low quality paper in bulk), and the online sites are just as good at sucking news off Reuters as a newspaper, traditional news media is dying.
Helping reporters get out of jail is a noble cause. Thinking that your narrow focus in this activity makes you some kind of universal expert on press freedom is the stupidest fucking thing I've heard this week. News is killed more often with a pen than a sword - or in this case, a phone call from a billionaire that the boss plays golf with.
Nimwits. This is not news. It's a piece of propaganda to sell thier particular cause.
So when your state has the highest crime rates and lowest education standards blame yourself.
Personally, that's why I back the FSP. I want to know how it will turn out, and if 20,000 people are willing to volunteer as guinnea pigs, so much the better!
You are just guessing how things will turn out. I, on the other hand, would like to know. You have to admit it will at least be fun to watch.
Highway funds can be persuasive. I believe it was the threatened withdrawl of highway funds that forced Montana to adopt a daytime speed limit, which they didn't have.
Honestly, having the same speed limit for the overpopulated, hilly, crowded East and the great plains of the West, where you can see other cars a mile off, is just having a rule for the sake of having a rule. It's a fine proof by example that there's a maximum number of people one government can represent effectively.
Where, precisely, does it say they intend to ignore federal law? If you actually, oh, read the site, you notice that they want to start with state laws, which they can do if they all live in the same state.
The argument goes that 20k activists outweigh 1.5M average apathetic Americans. Is that true? Perhaps. 20k lobbyists most certainly outweighs 1.5M average Americans, though, so you should take off your blinders and stop pretending that all people's opinions count equally. They don't, especially when you have a shiny television to tell you what your opinion is.
The SNPs keep rolling past, revealing more mutations, including a type-2 diabetes susceptibility, which tells me I may want to steer clear of junk food. More bad news: I don't have a SNP called CCR5 that prevents me from acquiring HIV, nor one that seems to shield smokers from lung cancer. "Ja, that's my favorite," says Braun, himself a smoker. "I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that."
Hearing about CCR5 was the only thing in this article that blew my socks off. Genetic immunity to HIV? Wow.
Google hits a lot of things when doing a search for CCR5. The most approachable is here.
I believe that these guys try the wrong way to persuade others that the DMCA is bad.
What? This is one of the most effective anti-DMCA bits, uh, ever. "You, over there. In the US. You can't read this. Shoo." Telling people 'no' is a sure way to invoke thier interest.
Don't forget that when using Entropia, your computer's cycles are used for some commercial tasks to earn Entropia money. I have no idea what the ratios are for commercial vs non-commercial. They don't say, which makes me suspicious.
Science lived in Aristotle's shadow for a long time. This was both good and bad. Good, becuase Aristotle was quite clever and there was a lot of useful stuff in his shadow. Bad, because his work was taken as gospel, complete and correct in all areas.
I think it's very easy to forget about how different the minds of people are between now and then. Concepts we take for granted - uniform space, causality, the scientific method, non-contact forces - wern't even a part of the intellectual landscape. I think if anyone ever actually invented a time machine, going back far enough would encounter humans almost alien in thought. We all share premises from growing up in this era. They had different premises, perhaps different enough to hinder communication even if a common language was found.
Every time you read something obvious in one of Aristotle's works, remember - it's only obvious now because he wrote it then. Imagine, perhaps, a world where it's not obvious and think about how we got from there to here.
According to researchers at F-Secure, the Slapper.B worm variant is able to retrieve its source code from a Web page after the worm has been removed from infected servers. The worm uses a common free software utility, wget, to retrieve its source code from an infected Web page in the home.ro domain.
Administrators of the domain, which is located in Romania, have been notified and the infected page has been deleted from the site, according to F-Secure.
They should have replaced the code for the worm with code that pops up a window that says "Patch your server, you halfwit!"
Slashdot Mirror
Christmas comes early this year for the black hats! How many other gag orders like this exist under the patriot act? How many people are hindered in finding out if inquiries are coming from a valid source? How many shady groups are already using this enviornment of secrecy to reach thier nefarious ends?
Can the EFF get involved in this? It's a little outside of thier turf, as I understand it, but it's a worthy thing to combat or at least publicise.
The people don't want GM food at this point in time
Who is telling the people what they want? What groups are pushing against GMed food? I'm having trouble imagining spontaneous anti-GM sentiment.
So is that 1/20th or 1/40th of Microsoft's cash reserves?
Rumor has it that Oregon has made some kinds of suicide legal. I don't know what that has done to Oregon's suicide rate, but I'm sure it's a checkable statistic (that I'm too lazy to Google up).
Irrelevant, come to think of it. People heading there to off themselves would throw off the statistics.
I suspect your choice of suicide as a comparison to marijuana, heroin, ethanol, or nicotine is likewise flawed. Suicide is not normally seen (or felt) as desireable, even by the infinitesimally small minority who actually commit suicide. On the other hand, most heroin, ethanol, nicotine, or marijuana users see those drugs as highly desireable.
That's essentially the core of my original point. Drugs zap the pleasure center of your brain, directly or indirectly, and thus usage rises regardless of laws. Suicide doesn't zap the pleasure center. Neither does Linux. You state, without evidence, that linux becoming illegal will increase it's use. I invite you to prove this statement instead of just saying it in many different ways.
The problem with "goals" in legislation is that they are almost always unattainable. In the case of drugs (or crypto'd Linux), the goal is to reduce the usage of something the government doesn't like, but the result is the growth of that usage far beyond what it would have been had the government kept its busybody fingers to itself and let the people make their own choices and take personal responsibility for those choices.
I'm worried that you're just repeating retoric, which makes me feel like I'm talking /dev/null.
Demonstrating that making something illegal causes growth is far from trivial. Lots of factors affect growth. It doesn't help that drug use for any given drug is largely untracked. But if we take cocaine as an example, usage per capita has plummeted since it became illegal - because cocaine used to be used in medicines and beverages sold over the counter, so you could become a user by buying the wrong soda. It's my guess that drug use depends a lot more on other factors than legality.
Banning crypto is like banning crack. Or worse. It's a lot easier to get crypto that works well (gpg, pgp, openssl, openssh) anywhere in the world with a phone connection, than it is to get crack, and crytpo costs a lot less. Banning crypto just makes it more obvious that governments are populated by a bunch of clueless idiots who have no idea what they're doing and no understanding of the consequences thereof.
That's great copy but it's pretty much irrelevant to what we're talking about.
I'm not sure... I think there's a flaw in your argument somewhere. I think the profit made by linux vendors would improve from the artifical scarcity of a black market. I think that people would think of guys in outfits out of the Matrix when they thought of Linux users, instead of fat guys with beards. I think Linux would become more widely known.
But, would banning Linux actually cause more users? Somehow I doubt it. If we find a jurisdiction where suicide isn't illegal and make it so, then we're not going to see a doubling of suicide rates or anything like that. (Note to self. Is there a jurisdiction where suicide is legal? This would be... interesting... to test.) The goal of legislation is to repress the growth in usage of something the government doesn't want you to use. The legislation didn't cause the growth - it just failed to stop it. The growth is already there, as the law generally does not legislate truly fringe elements. (For instance, there are plenty of drugs that you can get by mail order now that are at least as 'druggy' as marajuana and lsd, but they arn't illegal because of the exceptional minority of users.)
How in the world are old-money interests going to retain control over all of the new-economy ventures if new ventures have the ability to start up without old-money funds? This is a blow to our old-money controlled capitalist-worshipping way of life and must be stopped as soon as possible! Someone call Dubya and have him send in the BATF after these commie hippies!
Can a black market 'shotgun attachment' be far away?
The robot can also upload everything it hears and sees to the Internet. Say you're staying late at work and want to make sure your kids are doing their homework, Xie said. You can direct the robot around your house, find your kids and check up on them by viewing the robot's video online.
I'm sure my childhood would have been loads better if a robot stalked me through the hallways.
Or the banning of Linux in several countries. Whichever comes first, you know.
You have to learn entirely different programming methods to program algorithms to run in parallel. Managing memory and cache access between multiple processors is a pain in the ass on the hardware side. That's what makes mobos for multiple processors more expensive. Plus, some tasks are just not well-suited to scaling across multiple processors at all.
In short, I'd rather have a one processor machine over a two or more processor machine if the one processor machine gives sufficient speed for a reasonable price.
Pointless, right? Well, does this cryptography cracking have a point? We know that the algorithm will be cracked when the right key is hit. It's just as much electrowanking as jumping up and down when your
computer counts to a million, with a bit of cryptography politics thrown in.
I don't get why people are drwan to these projects over more significant problems like OGM or protein folding.
This here is press-men deciding which places are best for the press to do buisness in. In other words, can you report what you see without going to jail? That's thier bit. Read the bottom. They help reporters in jail.
I imagine it completely neglects many things that we consider *very* important for press freedom. I imagine they close thier eyes to internal buisness politics and the media owners themselves. After all, they are reporters. They think they are the bastion for the free spread of information, yet look at the newspapers! Really look at the fucking newspapers. They parrot Reuters. That's it. The censorship that they do, that they learned to do to rise in thier profession (troublesome reporters who hinder sales *do* *not* *rise*), that thier bosses do, is a giant blind spot. Investigative reporting is dead - and they and thier bosses let it die - and they're running around pretending that the US sticking a couple of people in jail for tresspassing is a serious factor in the fucked up new-speak trash that passes as journalism around the world compared to the fact that Monsano can kill a story with a fucking phone call!
All of the US government repression in the world is a drop in the fucking bucket compared to the simple fact that every time you find a reporter who broke a real story, big news, better than 50 percent of the time he lost his job. Journalists repressed by the government? Fuck that. The press destroyed itself.
If the press were doing investigative journalism, if the journalists had skills at finding the stories (and wern't fired for doing so) - then it would be an uphill battle for the internet to brush aside the newspapers as a media source. Since journalism is dead, probably never existed in the way we think of it (hasn't it always been about getting people to buy large square sheets of low quality paper in bulk), and the online sites are just as good at sucking news off Reuters as a newspaper, traditional news media is dying.
Helping reporters get out of jail is a noble cause. Thinking that your narrow focus in this activity makes you some kind of universal expert on press freedom is the stupidest fucking thing I've heard this week. News is killed more often with a pen than a sword - or in this case, a phone call from a billionaire that the boss plays golf with.
Nimwits. This is not news. It's a piece of propaganda to sell thier particular cause.
So when your state has the highest crime rates and lowest education standards blame yourself.
Personally, that's why I back the FSP. I want to know how it will turn out, and if 20,000 people are willing to volunteer as guinnea pigs, so much the better!
You are just guessing how things will turn out. I, on the other hand, would like to know. You have to admit it will at least be fun to watch.
And they can't legalize them until you move there. Funny catch-22, you see, they need the votes.
Highway funds can be persuasive. I believe it was the threatened withdrawl of highway funds that forced Montana to adopt a daytime speed limit, which they didn't have.
Honestly, having the same speed limit for the overpopulated, hilly, crowded East and the great plains of the West, where you can see other cars a mile off, is just having a rule for the sake of having a rule. It's a fine proof by example that there's a maximum number of people one government can represent effectively.
Where, precisely, does it say they intend to ignore federal law? If you actually, oh, read the site, you notice that they want to start with state laws, which they can do if they all live in the same state.
The argument goes that 20k activists outweigh 1.5M average apathetic Americans. Is that true? Perhaps. 20k lobbyists most certainly outweighs 1.5M average Americans, though, so you should take off your blinders and stop pretending that all people's opinions count equally. They don't, especially when you have a shiny television to tell you what your opinion is.
From the article:
The SNPs keep rolling past, revealing more mutations, including a type-2 diabetes susceptibility, which tells me I may want to steer clear of junk food. More bad news: I don't have a SNP called CCR5 that prevents me from acquiring HIV, nor one that seems to shield smokers from lung cancer. "Ja, that's my favorite," says Braun, himself a smoker. "I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that."
Hearing about CCR5 was the only thing in this article that blew my socks off. Genetic immunity to HIV? Wow.
Google hits a lot of things when doing a search for CCR5. The most approachable is here.
I believe that these guys try the wrong way to persuade others that the DMCA is bad.
What? This is one of the most effective anti-DMCA bits, uh, ever. "You, over there. In the US. You can't read this. Shoo." Telling people 'no' is a sure way to invoke thier interest.
Don't forget that when using Entropia, your computer's cycles are used for some commercial tasks to earn Entropia money. I have no idea what the ratios are for commercial vs non-commercial. They don't say, which makes me suspicious.
Right! Most of the freelance writers I know are demanding food.
would love to see everyone's cable modem be a small internet router for people's data to travel through
Is it just me, or is that statement total technobabble? Say I put a router in my house. Where does the data go through it to?
Science lived in Aristotle's shadow for a long time. This was both good and bad. Good, becuase Aristotle was quite clever and there was a lot of useful stuff in his shadow. Bad, because his work was taken as gospel, complete and correct in all areas.
I think it's very easy to forget about how different the minds of people are between now and then. Concepts we take for granted - uniform space, causality, the scientific method, non-contact forces - wern't even a part of the intellectual landscape. I think if anyone ever actually invented a time machine, going back far enough would encounter humans almost alien in thought. We all share premises from growing up in this era. They had different premises, perhaps different enough to hinder communication even if a common language was found.
Every time you read something obvious in one of Aristotle's works, remember - it's only obvious now because he wrote it then. Imagine, perhaps, a world where it's not obvious and think about how we got from there to here.
According to researchers at F-Secure, the Slapper.B worm variant is able to retrieve its source code from a Web page after the worm has been removed from infected servers. The worm uses a common free software utility, wget, to retrieve its source code from an infected Web page in the home.ro domain.
Administrators of the domain, which is located in Romania, have been notified and the infected page has been deleted from the site, according to F-Secure.
They should have replaced the code for the worm with code that pops up a window that says "Patch your server, you halfwit!"