First of all, if you're really that paranoid about who is listening to your cell phone conversation, then you shouldn't broadcast it in radio to begin with. Aliens on Mars could potentially receive it as well.
As for bombs, do you have any idea how many bombs this system mostlikely has prevented? Also, according to the Constitution, planning a crime means there's intention to commit the crime, which is illegal. Therefore writing an email planning out how to blow up the Whitehouse is illegal. So they really aren't two seperate things. Writing an email planning out a bombing is not only illegal if you're intending to carry it out, but unless your psycho, you wouldn't be doing it. There are exceptions of course, like a child's pranks, etc.
The NSA does not have a PR department. That "spokeswoman" is probably a person designated for this specific instance. Her job otherwise is mostlikely something completely different. I know for a fact however, that the NSA does not have a Public Relations department, or any such department to deal with the public or media. In this case reading the article, which I did, is completely irrelevent to this fact.
Thats exactly what it is, FUD. The NSA has never denied the existence of Echelon. In fact, the NSA has never denied the existence of ANYTHING, simply because the NSA has NO PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT. Nobody at the NSA has ever spoken to the press about anything. As for denying the existence of Echelon? Congress told us about that. The NSA demonstrated Echelon to Congress a couple years ago, and Congress was who officially acknowledged Echelon. As for your example, if you were to buy a nuclear bomb, the spooks at the NSA wouldn't get you, it'd be the CIA (assuming you're not inside the country), and if the CIA were to work inside the country to get you, I'd hope they would kill you, and I believe they would have every right to with Executive consent. The NSA is a bunch of really, really, really smart nerds who gather information. Thats all they do. They don't kill people, restrict your rights, etc. all they do is try to gather as much information as they can for the sole means of providing unbias information to our leaders. Is this bad? Absolutely not. If it weren't for the NSA, NYC, DC, Seattle, Boston, etc. would have mostlikely been blown up by zealots by now. Just remember that they're citizens too. They are not law enforcement, just information gatherers. Live with it.
I actually just considered the whole thing a joke. I think if you really, truely wanted to get a response from it, dumping 'AK-47' into an email is not the way. For one thing the NSA works with codes. If I were to truely want to set off buzzers and whistles, I'd use some extremely low level encryption, or substitutive alphabet words. I think something like 'I fly kites by the cylinders foot' would hit some whistles, simply because it makes no sense and this is the form that most codes are made (where one word means another. Dumping certain keywords in all caps is not going to do much. In fact, even if it were to flood their systems (which I can't see how it would since they're doing pattern searches on everything) then all they'd need to do is remove that text... not a very difficult solution. So like I said, I considered this whole jam Echelon day nothing more then a joke... didn't really expect anyone else to think any more then that, but I guess some of you did.
I honestly can't see this patent holding up in court. Like the article says, Amazon is always in the middle of a lawsuit with some company over something. I think them picking a fight with barnes and noble is just stupid, because they will lose their patent. This is pretty much equivalent to "1-Click" Logins... "your user information gets stored in a database and the browser receives a cookie...". Could anyone see a patent like that every holding up in court? Obviously not. Therefore this patent is soon to be dead in the water, in my opinnion.
It may be considered free speech to allow people to donate to a political campaign. What is not considered free speech however is the political campaign's right to accept a donation. All we need to do is outlaw political campaigns from having the right to accept money.
My personal opinnion however is that companies should be completely restricted from donating money to political campaigns altogether. Companies are not individuals. I think all political donations should be illegal with the exception of personal donations. Personal donations should also have a small cap like $500 per campaign.
I think this would remove this horrible pleutocracy.
Papers like this are great and everything, but they lack substance, specificly because all reasoning is done on a philosophical basis.
He explains his reasoning for thinking that time is a state of mind. He includes references to quantum mechanics and the universe on a cosmological scale, but when it comes down to it, its philosphical reasoning. Logic is great. Nothing could be done without logic. However logic requires specific facts and examples to back it up. I consider this philosophy because all it does is tell you to look at the universe in a certain way, and maybe this will explain certain things but offers no real evidence for why they would be explained.
Here's a question that pops up in astronomy a lot that I consider to be on the same level (some what) of this paper: "Are there alternate universes?"
The answer is simply that: If there are alternate universes, and they influence our universe in any way, then that makes them part of our universe. However if there are alternate universes, and they don't influence us in any way, then they don't exist in any respect to us, and are therefore not worth worrying about.
The point of this analogy is that the question causes you to look at the universe a certain way. This certain point of view is completely void of any facts or proof that would uphold their model of the universe.
I feel this paper or essay or exerpt (or whatever it is) is the same thing.
I give this 2 Lawsuits before this patent is taken away from them. But Scream and hollar anyways about IP, communism, etc.
The truth is, even though the entire patent system may be a little wacky, a patent like this will not stand. Amazon is confusing a trademark with a patent. Everyone knows they didn't invent the concept of "one click shopping", they just invented the neat term to describe it.
Actually, that is completely incorrect. Congress signed a bill which makes it illegal for insurance agencies to discriminate based on genes. In fact, I think its even illegal for them to have a genetic database.
Pull your head out of your ass and look around at all the geneticly perfect people who are going to ceize control of congress (or the world), and make you sweep floors because you have bad eye-site.
No offense, but abortions have been occurring since Adam ate the apple. There is something called a Constitution. If an employer were to ask me if I smoked crack, and I said yes, and I ended up being fired, I could sue. Hell if I were to not get a christmas bonus, I could sue. You guys let Hollywood blow out your sense of reality.
If I can prevent my kids from having asthma, or prevent them from being diabetic, having heart disease, contracting cancer, I'm going to do it. This sort of thing has already been done. A couple in Boston who both have Sickle Cell disease were able to have children who did not have the gene. The used the exact same method as what Gattica discusses. I think its a great idea, but lets be realistic, people will never, EVER be allowed to discriminate based on genes, atleast not in the US. There are certain rights that every human-being retains in this country. Everyone here with a big conspiratorial imagination can believe that some enormous class system will arise from this, but I can't see that happen. The most threatening thins, I think, is i the insurance companies were to get hold of your gene sequence and find out how much of a risk you are. That however has already been outlawed.
They're going to hack a couple ISP's and do some password sniffing? Try to read email in a language they don't understand? Thats the extent of their hacking ability.
The difference between a trade school and college is that college teaches you how to teach yourself. College teaches you how to learn. At my school, in my CS dept, they're constantly telling people in the 100-level courses that they don't teach the programming language, they teach you how to learn it.
The point is that regardless of what school you go to, if you want to learn Cold Fusion, then you do a project in Cold Fusion and teach yourself. Same goes for ASP, Perl, etc. You teach yourself the language, the profs are just there to teach you concepts.
Pluto has always been considered a boarder-line minor planet. A Minor planet is basicly something the size of a small moon or large asteroid orbiting in our solar system. They don't tell the mass, so I assume that this is just what it is, a minor planet. There are a lot of minor planets out there, so this guy finding one would not be that much of a break through. Pluto is only famous because it was found a long time ago and became famous (1930's I think). The technique this astronomer used to find it is cool, its been done before to find planets exterior to our solar system through.
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level.
Isn't this what groups are for? If you set it up correctly, you have completely identical situations. What they're saying here is jsut outright false.
Should Linux have Service Packs? Absolutely. Thats a great idea. However with RedHat they're called RPM's and are smaller (maybe someone can think of a way of bundliing all of the errata updates together).
Does this EXCUSE PC Week for blatently being biased against Linux in their "Professional" testing? Absolutely not. Not only would installing the latest SP from MS _NOT_ fix every vulnerability in NT, but the mere fact that they installed it for the sake of security, and installed nothing for Linux makes this test look outright fradulent.
I wonder if you can sue for that? Defimation of Linux?
One thing this article states is that Cyber-Terrorism is on a mass scale where it effects a large group of people, and possibly produces fatalities. Although the threat of fatalities may be far-fetched, effecting large amounts of people are not. Everyday, more and more people are relying on the net to communicate information and do tasks. The most vulnerable I've come to think is online stock trading. Companies like E*Trade and Ameritrade are booming from their $8/trade deals. As more people rely on such systems and become confident in them, they move their entire day-trading portfolio out of mere convenience and to save money. What then would happen if a single person (because that is all it takes) was able to shutdown the computer systems of such a company for 1 week? At its current state, it would mostlikely have an effect only on its own share value. What if they became the normal means to trade stock? The effects could be temporarily devestating, instilling panic in many. This situation is made possible because online trading is done via insecure online networks. Cryptography secures that your data is not readable except to those who have extremely powerful machines and mathemeticians (No Such Agency), but nothing protects these machines that are handling the online trading with the exception of routers and switches. Not only do such firewalls have vulnerabilities, but they still need to leave a globally accessible port open for anyone to take advantage of (whether legitimate or otherwise). The point here is: Why are we putting systems like this on an internet with known security holes if the pitfall is potentially huge? Military websites hacked by script-kiddie, who cares, thats placed where everyone knows its vulnerable. Major computer systems that have a direct effect on our country's financial systems on such a network? That seems like blasphemy. Any system can fall victim to a denial of service attack. These attacks can also be traced (over time) and be filtered or terminated. Someone cracking a system through unknown means however, nobody knows if that is 100% detectible.
Getting a patent is not the hard part of the issue. Having it be upheld in court _is_. Just because Joe Schmo from Norway thinks he's invented/discovered online shopping and patented it does not mean that the world is screwed because of legal-eese. What it actually means is that he's stupid enough to setup his own legal battles that he is destined to lose horribly. All he has done is put himself/organization in the position to be sued.
Simple explanation for CNN getting a clue (no offense). They've obviously got someone there reading Slashdot. I've noticed a few articles on there _after_ something similar was posted on Slashdot (i.e. they're reading articles that us geeks like, then researching it and posting their own articles on CNN). I wouldn't call it plagerism. I wouldn't even call it bad. In Fact, I'd have to say that this is a pretty clever concept of satisfying geek-dom (its actually probably someone at IDG since they write a lot of CNN's tech articles).
//BEGIN RANT Thank God they're not posting Livingston's vague and somewhat innacurate articles anymore. Anyone remember the "Microsoft Windows98 Disables Competitors Hardware"? Not sure if thats the correct title of it, but boy was that a blatent hoax to get you to click the article and increase his salary by $0.001 or whatever. //END RANT
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, if you're really that paranoid about who is listening to your cell phone conversation, then you shouldn't broadcast it in radio to begin with. Aliens on Mars could potentially receive it as well.
As for bombs, do you have any idea how many bombs this system mostlikely has prevented? Also, according to the Constitution, planning a crime means there's intention to commit the crime, which is illegal. Therefore writing an email planning out how to blow up the Whitehouse is illegal. So they really aren't two seperate things. Writing an email planning out a bombing is not only illegal if you're intending to carry it out, but unless your psycho, you wouldn't be doing it. There are exceptions of course, like a child's pranks, etc.
The NSA does not have a PR department. That "spokeswoman" is probably a person designated for this specific instance. Her job otherwise is mostlikely something completely different. I know for a fact however, that the NSA does not have a Public Relations department, or any such department to deal with the public or media. In this case reading the article, which I did, is completely irrelevent to this fact.
So here's the FUD I bring to the table.
Thats exactly what it is, FUD. The NSA has never denied the existence of Echelon. In fact, the NSA has never denied the existence of ANYTHING, simply because the NSA has NO PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT. Nobody at the NSA has ever spoken to the press about anything. As for denying the existence of Echelon? Congress told us about that. The NSA demonstrated Echelon to Congress a couple years ago, and Congress was who officially acknowledged Echelon.
As for your example, if you were to buy a nuclear bomb, the spooks at the NSA wouldn't get you, it'd be the CIA (assuming you're not inside the country), and if the CIA were to work inside the country to get you, I'd hope they would kill you, and I believe they would have every right to with Executive consent. The NSA is a bunch of really, really, really smart nerds who gather information. Thats all they do. They don't kill people, restrict your rights, etc. all they do is try to gather as much information as they can for the sole means of providing unbias information to our leaders. Is this bad? Absolutely not. If it weren't for the NSA, NYC, DC, Seattle, Boston, etc. would have mostlikely been blown up by zealots by now. Just remember that they're citizens too. They are not law enforcement, just information gatherers. Live with it.
How is what they are doing any different then getting your hand bag ex-rayed at an airport? Its not. Do you consider that a violation of your rights?
All the photos they have online...HERE
I actually just considered the whole thing a joke. I think if you really, truely wanted to get a response from it, dumping 'AK-47' into an email is not the way. For one thing the NSA works with codes. If I were to truely want to set off buzzers and whistles, I'd use some extremely low level encryption, or substitutive alphabet words. I think something like 'I fly kites by the cylinders foot' would hit some whistles, simply because it makes no sense and this is the form that most codes are made (where one word means another. Dumping certain keywords in all caps is not going to do much. In fact, even if it were to flood their systems (which I can't see how it would since they're doing pattern searches on everything) then all they'd need to do is remove that text... not a very difficult solution.
So like I said, I considered this whole jam Echelon day nothing more then a joke... didn't really expect anyone else to think any more then that, but I guess some of you did.
I honestly can't see this patent holding up in court. Like the article says, Amazon is always in the middle of a lawsuit with some company over something. I think them picking a fight with barnes and noble is just stupid, because they will lose their patent. This is pretty much equivalent to "1-Click" Logins... "your user information gets stored in a database and the browser receives a cookie...". Could anyone see a patent like that every holding up in court? Obviously not. Therefore this patent is soon to be dead in the water, in my opinnion.
FYI, patenting something doesn't come cheap. We're talking $20k.
It may be considered free speech to allow people to donate to a political campaign. What is not considered free speech however is the political campaign's right to accept a donation. All we need to do is outlaw political campaigns from having the right to accept money.
My personal opinnion however is that companies should be completely restricted from donating money to political campaigns altogether. Companies are not individuals. I think all political donations should be illegal with the exception of personal donations. Personal donations should also have a small cap like $500 per campaign.
I think this would remove this horrible pleutocracy.
Papers like this are great and everything, but they lack substance, specificly because all reasoning is done on a philosophical basis.
He explains his reasoning for thinking that time is a state of mind. He includes references to quantum mechanics and the universe on a cosmological scale, but when it comes down to it, its philosphical reasoning. Logic is great. Nothing could be done without logic. However logic requires specific facts and examples to back it up. I consider this philosophy because all it does is tell you to look at the universe in a certain way, and maybe this will explain certain things but offers no real evidence for why they would be explained.
Here's a question that pops up in astronomy a lot that I consider to be on the same level (some what) of this paper: "Are there alternate universes?"
The answer is simply that: If there are alternate universes, and they influence our universe in any way, then that makes them part of our universe. However if there are alternate universes, and they don't influence us in any way, then they don't exist in any respect to us, and are therefore not worth worrying about.
The point of this analogy is that the question causes you to look at the universe a certain way. This certain point of view is completely void of any facts or proof that would uphold their model of the universe.
I feel this paper or essay or exerpt (or whatever it is) is the same thing.
I give this 2 Lawsuits before this patent is taken away from them. But Scream and hollar anyways about IP, communism, etc.
The truth is, even though the entire patent system may be a little wacky, a patent like this will not stand. Amazon is confusing a trademark with a patent. Everyone knows they didn't invent the concept of "one click shopping", they just invented the neat term to describe it.
Actually, that is completely incorrect.
Congress signed a bill which makes it illegal for insurance agencies to discriminate based on genes. In fact, I think its even illegal for them to have a genetic database.
Pull your head out of your ass and look around at all the geneticly perfect people who are going to ceize control of congress (or the world), and make you sweep floors because you have bad eye-site.
You people are so conspiratorial
Guy, catch a clue.
Lawsuit material, right there.
All you'd need to show is that their little "Drug Tester" was capable of testing genetic sequences and its a done deal.
I love the way all these people hide behind anonymous coward when their sense of reality is greatly warped.
No offense, but abortions have been occurring since Adam ate the apple. There is something called a Constitution. If an employer were to ask me if I smoked crack, and I said yes, and I ended up being fired, I could sue. Hell if I were to not get a christmas bonus, I could sue. You guys let Hollywood blow out your sense of reality.
What? You can't even ask someone if they've smoked a joint before. Besides, since when is being black a genetic defect or defficiency?
If I can prevent my kids from having asthma, or prevent them from being diabetic, having heart disease, contracting cancer, I'm going to do it. This sort of thing has already been done. A couple in Boston who both have Sickle Cell disease were able to have children who did not have the gene. The used the exact same method as what Gattica discusses. I think its a great idea, but lets be realistic, people will never, EVER be allowed to discriminate based on genes, atleast not in the US. There are certain rights that every human-being retains in this country. Everyone here with a big conspiratorial imagination can believe that some enormous class system will arise from this, but I can't see that happen. The most threatening thins, I think, is i the insurance companies were to get hold of your gene sequence and find out how much of a risk you are. That however has already been outlawed.
my $.02 Fire away Flame
Which would mean what exactly?
They're going to hack a couple ISP's and do some password sniffing? Try to read email in a language they don't understand? Thats the extent of their hacking ability.
The difference between a trade school and college is that college teaches you how to teach yourself. College teaches you how to learn. At my school, in my CS dept, they're constantly telling people in the 100-level courses that they don't teach the programming language, they teach you how to learn it.
The point is that regardless of what school you go to, if you want to learn Cold Fusion, then you do a project in Cold Fusion and teach yourself. Same goes for ASP, Perl, etc. You teach yourself the language, the profs are just there to teach you concepts.
~~Kev
Pluto has always been considered a boarder-line minor planet. A Minor planet is basicly something the size of a small moon or large asteroid orbiting in our solar system. They don't tell the mass, so I assume that this is just what it is, a minor planet. There are a lot of minor planets out there, so this guy finding one would not be that much of a break through. Pluto is only famous because it was found a long time ago and became famous (1930's I think). The technique this astronomer used to find it is cool, its been done before to find planets exterior to our solar system through.
Linux security is all-or-nothing. Administrators cannot delegate administrative privileges: a user who needs any administrative capability must be made a full administrator, which compromises best security practices. In
contrast, Windows NT allows an administrator to delegate privileges at an exceptionally fine-grained level.
Isn't this what groups are for? If you set it up correctly, you have completely identical situations. What they're saying here is jsut outright false.
Should Linux have Service Packs?
Absolutely. Thats a great idea. However with RedHat they're called RPM's and are smaller (maybe someone can think of a way of bundliing all of the errata updates together).
Does this EXCUSE PC Week for blatently being biased against Linux in their "Professional" testing?
Absolutely not. Not only would installing the latest SP from MS _NOT_ fix every vulnerability in NT, but the mere fact that they installed it for the sake of security, and installed nothing for Linux makes this test look outright fradulent.
I wonder if you can sue for that? Defimation of Linux?
One thing this article states is that Cyber-Terrorism is on a mass scale where it effects a large group of people, and possibly produces fatalities. Although the threat of fatalities may be far-fetched, effecting large amounts of people are not.
Everyday, more and more people are relying on the net to communicate information and do tasks. The most vulnerable I've come to think is online stock trading. Companies like E*Trade and Ameritrade are booming from their $8/trade deals. As more people rely on such systems and become confident in them, they move their entire day-trading portfolio out of mere convenience and to save money. What then would happen if a single person (because that is all it takes) was able to shutdown the computer systems of such a company for 1 week? At its current state, it would mostlikely have an effect only on its own share value. What if they became the normal means to trade stock? The effects could be temporarily devestating, instilling panic in many. This situation is made possible because online trading is done via insecure online networks. Cryptography secures that your data is not readable except to those who have extremely powerful machines and mathemeticians (No Such Agency), but nothing protects these machines that are handling the online trading with the exception of routers and switches. Not only do such firewalls have vulnerabilities, but they still need to leave a globally accessible port open for anyone to take advantage of (whether legitimate or otherwise). The point here is: Why are we putting systems like this on an internet with known security holes if the pitfall is potentially huge? Military websites hacked by script-kiddie, who cares, thats placed where everyone knows its vulnerable. Major computer systems that have a direct effect on our country's financial systems on such a network? That seems like blasphemy.
Any system can fall victim to a denial of service attack. These attacks can also be traced (over time) and be filtered or terminated. Someone cracking a system through unknown means however, nobody knows if that is 100% detectible.
A better question is why the hell are there pengiuns in the Central Park Zoo?
My guess is that, since they are mammals, and thus warm blooded animals, that there is a certain threshold in which they can live.
Getting a patent is not the hard part of the issue. Having it be upheld in court _is_. Just because Joe Schmo from Norway thinks he's invented/discovered online shopping and patented it does not mean that the world is screwed because of legal-eese. What it actually means is that he's stupid enough to setup his own legal battles that he is destined to lose horribly. All he has done is put himself/organization in the position to be sued.
Simple explanation for CNN getting a clue (no offense). They've obviously got someone there reading Slashdot. I've noticed a few articles on there _after_ something similar was posted on Slashdot (i.e. they're reading articles that us geeks like, then researching it and posting their own articles on CNN). I wouldn't call it plagerism. I wouldn't even call it bad. In Fact, I'd have to say that this is a pretty clever concept of satisfying geek-dom (its actually probably someone at IDG since they write a lot of CNN's tech articles).
//BEGIN RANT
Thank God they're not posting Livingston's vague and somewhat innacurate articles anymore. Anyone remember the "Microsoft Windows98 Disables Competitors Hardware"? Not sure if thats the correct title of it, but boy was that a blatent hoax to get you to click the article and increase his salary by $0.001 or whatever.
//END RANT