"And yeah, it is kind of hazy regarding what information of value they hope to extract from this data. The slashdot writeup "...or it may be as groundbreaking as a clue to completely new physics, perhaps related to dark matter or dark energy" sounds like a nutcase trying to sell something."
That's the old universe for ya, always trying to sell ya those new fangled phyisical laws when the ol' uns a just doin us fine. Oh wait.
Their proposal is to solve the secrets of the universe for $250k. I might suggest that maybe the goal should be to simply transfer the data for $10k, and let somebody else pay for solving the secrets of the universe. The data recovery project is also far more likely to be successful...
Chances are you are not going to solve the secrets of the universe hiring one or two consultants. Data recovery and publication is the key. Put it into as many people's hands as possible (internet publication) so that the many hypothesis can be tested against the real data.
In England and Wales, "a defendant cannot be convicted solely due to their silence" yet this is saying precisely the opposite.
I think you have found the flaw in the original law... We just need to make it a crime for people not to reveal their crimes. Suspect someone of murder, make it a crime for them not to show you where the body is buried. Suspect someone of robbery, just make it a crime for them not to show you where the loot is hidden. Suspect someone of criminal sexual acts, then make it a seperate crime if they don't show you the video (we know all those pervs take videos).
By gosh Man, you've found it, the Secret to stopping Crime.
I'll bite. No, wanting to track your visitors is not evil. Subverting their wishes by using flash to get around user preferences about pop-up ads and cookie settings is evil.
If I choose not to allow cookies to be set that wish should be respected, if you in turn choose not to let me view content I should respect that as your decision as well. If I choose not a allow pop ups, then marketers should not subvert my wishes by using flash pop-ups or exploit some javascript hole. Depending on the type of hack used, then it is not only immoral, but quite likely it is an illegal access of my computer if anyone actually took the time to prosecute it.
That way, people will have more natural light and use less artificial light in the evening (and use more of it in the morning... making the whole thing kinda pointless. Good thing we can rely on congress to do pointless stuff...).
Either way I plan on getting up after the sun rises.
Offender (defendant): So, in conclusion I would argue that thereto and therefore the officer could not have accurately observed my vehicle with precision given that the uncertainty priciple means that.... er... well, that either a particle's velocity or its position may be accurately measured but not both. Therefore I have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the afore mentioned officer has erred egregiously beyond a reasonable doubt.
I'm always astounded by all the backseat drivers of the world who always know so much better what people should do, without ever feeling the need to do it themselves.
Talk is cheap. So, take it for what its worth.
Like backseat drivers, don't let yourself get distracted by them if you don't find value in the content of their ideas. Unless of course if the backseat driver is telling you that the bridge ahead is out, then you might want to take notice.
Yeah, right, give me a break - as opposed to China, the US doesn't have eminent domain, - the US government respects your property.
I never made the comparison. I never said that the US was any better than China regarding government respect for people's freedoms. Freedom is an absolute good relative only to itself. Sure we can go through and compare how each government violates freedom of its citizens for its own corrupt convenience, that isn't the point.
It is not a choice between freedom and educating children. It is not a choice between freedom and establishing and maintaining rights of way and bulding bridges. It is not a choice between freedom and security. These are all false choices. It is a false yin and yang. The chinese leadership is merely playing politics as any other western poltician would. Rather than looking at all the government takes away, they would rather show you what it gives.
It is an argument that you can always make, but it is a false argument. Look at how many good things the Roman's gave those they conquered, the roads the bridges, the systems of laws, many material things. The Eurpoean colonial powers could say the same. The USA tries to say the same about Iraq now. Look at how many governments conquer their own people everyday. Look at Turkmenistan and know how power corrupts. There have always been and will always be corruption, but to say that a government faces a choice between providing education or any other service and providing freedom is false. Governments don't provide freedom, they can only take it away.
That is an important point. The physics and exeriments with fusion used in weapons clearly show us that there can be a net usuable energy gain by converting matter to photons. We need to figure out the shielding and containment so we can do it without blowing ourselves up or cooking us.
So, fusion is now more an engineering problem, more so than one of fundamental physics. Other conceptual energy sources have much more fundamental problems with supply.
Maybe there are still some questions about ethanol, but if you get less energy out than you (versus the sun) put in, then it should be considered as an energy carrier not a source. Therefore it should be considered in the same category as things like power lines... it has a certain loss along the way, but also certain features which should be compared to other conveyances. Economics can figure this out, if it costs more to produce than it is worth, then likely you have some loss or inefficiency along the way. The science is just a sanity check.
He said, yes, freedom and liberty are important, but he believes, to a chinese person, even before he gets his full freedom, he'd rather have an education.
Sure and that is why we don't give full legal freedom to children. But at some point children must grow up and take on responsibility for their own lives and choices. That is what freedom is about.
You, communism and many western politicians present us with a false choice, between freedom and other things.
But freedom as it concerns a government is seperate from material things provided to people, but rather it is the concept that people have natural rights that the government will not take away. Freedom is that people are not arbitrarily interfered with by the government when they communicate with one another. Freedom is that people are not forced to perform work for others or by the government. Freedom is that people are not prevented by the government from moving or relocating from one place to another nor are they forced to do so. Freedom is that people be secure in their person and property and not be forced by the government to do anything to their bodies or give up their possessions.
Freedom is not about what a government can do for people, but what the government can't do to people.
"I think it's important to first make the existing problems go away rather than jump head-first into groundbreaking technology without considering potential problems, though that's how it has always been."
I hope you are joking... so you really think we should just stop making and buying computers until the bugs are worked out. Or is your theory not limited to computer technology and you wouldn't allow us to have cars until they can make one that can't crash or heat our houses until they can make a furnace that won't ever malfunction and cause a fire. Let me get that straight, no new technology until all problems with current technology are figured out and potential problems with new technology are considered and figured out?
I ask you, no beg you, to follow your own advice and please stop using your computer until all the bugs are worked out.
Please either mod the parent back down or funny, but "Insighful" comments like that give me the willies.
"There are a lot of things we could do right now to cut down on foreign oil dependency and greenhouse gas emissions:require better fuel efficiency from new cars, move more quickly towards hybrid vehicles, put in more commuter trains and subways, make cities better designed for walking and cycling."
Yes, redesigning our cities is really something that can be done "right now". And designing new cars with new technology doesn't take time either. I'm sure if your city put in an order for new trains they could have them Fedexed overnight and have them working the next day. I'm sure by the time I've finished completing this sentence all our energy dependence would have been taken care of.
"But auto makers and oil companies would lose out. So instead, they throw a few million bucks at hydrogen technologies, and that lets them say "see, we really give a shit!" and then keep building monstrosities of excess like the Hummer 2."
Personally, I prefer the H3 . Now that is a cool car.
Much as I would love to generate my own electricity, a wind turbine isn't likely to be allowed by my town.
I just put one up once a couple years ago, didn't ask permission, apparently the building inspector got a call about it but he said that he didn't see a problem with it... I was all ready to use a "decorative" defense as I was not using it to power my house and it was just above the existing roofline just did a few experiments with it and such, but it wasn't necessary.
However, Make sure it has wind braking or its natural rpms are low enough. The one I used started making the loudest most terrible sound I've ever heard at 4 am one morning during a rain and wind storm. Neighbors never complained, but I was up trying to stop the damn thing. Ended up wrecking the blades just to get it to stop.
With wind turbines bigger is better, both for power generation and noise.
"I'm really sick and tired of companies that have absolutely no clue how the Internet and the world wide web works putting up sites and then expecting you to never cache them anywhere. They have this old mentality that they control the flow of information and frankly, that's just not true anymore."
It was never true and companies and lawyers know very well by now how the internet works. This is just another example of people getting pissed off over something and getting their lawyers to try and trick judges into using the law inappropriately to retaliate against someone.
I have the legal right to download the content of the entire internet and make fair use of it and so does the Internet Archive.
And to add, is this really going to be the right solution for a 50 person company? And depending on how your organization is structured it might not even make sense for a 10,000 person company. My guess is that there is some sort of oscillating value curve as an organization scales which goes back and forth between cetralized mangement versus distributed.
The whole point about having a pc on someone's desk is besides the point i think, since you can remotely manage that desktop. And if space is really a consideration then you can always get a Mac Mini. Some organizations will want to be more tightly managed and cost will be a greater consideration and something like this might make sense as an investment over a number of years, else performance might be the greatest consideration and you will certainly be better off going with general workstations and replacing them more frequently.
And most people live somewhat near the coast where winds are higher on the open water.
The secret is no secret anymore, you just have to build the turbines big enough so they are quiet and the towers need to be smooth so that birds aren't building nests in the support structure.
It is not the only solution but it can be a practical contributor for the energy needs of some communities.
Are you suggesting ability to apply mod points to the original slashdot story? Maybe "Dupe" could be one of the options with a place to link to the original story. Maybe use all 5 mod points for a mega mod or something like that.
This is certainly offtopic, so Slashdot Editors should open up a discussion on feature requests, most would probably be pretty wild and self defeating, but there could be a few gems.
It's even more than that. The wireless router received a standard, "can I have legitimate credentials on this network?" request in the form of a DHCP lease request. The wireless router replied with valid credentials for that network. The user did not make any malformed requests, did not use any information that he should not have rightfully posessed, and in no way forced his way into the network.
He also properly followed FCC rules regarding the use of wireless equipment.
If the owner of a wireless transceiver, a radio if you will, doesn't want to let that device communicate then they bear the burden of making it not communicate. If they leave it in a mode that allows any public access over frequencies that belong to the public-at-large then they bear the responsibility.
Well said.
And since many people provide open access to their wireless networks as a public service there should be no presumption that the person believed they were not authorized. What the person might have been doing parked in a car using the internet... well I'll admit I'm suspicious, but there are a lot of good and legal reasons that someone would want to maintain anonymity. Heck maybe this person is having a romance with a chinese political activist and keeps getting blocked by the great firewall. Not likely but possible
He should not be charged with this, but if some illegal activity does get traced back to this person't network, then we would at least have a suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
"And yeah, it is kind of hazy regarding what information of value they hope to extract from this data. The slashdot writeup "...or it may be as groundbreaking as a clue to completely new physics, perhaps related to dark matter or dark energy" sounds like a nutcase trying to sell something."
That's the old universe for ya, always trying to sell ya those new fangled phyisical laws when the ol' uns a just doin us fine. Oh wait.
Their proposal is to solve the secrets of the universe for $250k. I might suggest that maybe the goal should be to simply transfer the data for $10k, and let somebody else pay for solving the secrets of the universe. The data recovery project is also far more likely to be successful...
Chances are you are not going to solve the secrets of the universe hiring one or two consultants. Data recovery and publication is the key. Put it into as many people's hands as possible (internet publication) so that the many hypothesis can be tested against the real data.
In England and Wales, "a defendant cannot be convicted solely due to their silence" yet this is saying precisely the opposite.
I think you have found the flaw in the original law... We just need to make it a crime for people not to reveal their crimes. Suspect someone of murder, make it a crime for them not to show you where the body is buried. Suspect someone of robbery, just make it a crime for them not to show you where the loot is hidden. Suspect someone of criminal sexual acts, then make it a seperate crime if they don't show you the video (we know all those pervs take videos).
By gosh Man, you've found it, the Secret to stopping Crime.
"Since they are in limbo they can be held indefinitely for as long as they prove to be usefull sources of information."
Funny I thought they were in prison, when all along they were in Limbo. That makes a difference, I hear Limbo is very nice this time of year.
Does that still make me evil?
I'll bite. No, wanting to track your visitors is not evil. Subverting their wishes by using flash to get around user preferences about pop-up ads and cookie settings is evil.
If I choose not to allow cookies to be set that wish should be respected, if you in turn choose not to let me view content I should respect that as your decision as well. If I choose not a allow pop ups, then marketers should not subvert my wishes by using flash pop-ups or exploit some javascript hole. Depending on the type of hack used, then it is not only immoral, but quite likely it is an illegal access of my computer if anyone actually took the time to prosecute it.
Why? Just put a sheet for people to sign in, sign out... ;)
You must be from upper management.
That way, people will have more natural light and use less artificial light in the evening (and use more of it in the morning... making the whole thing kinda pointless. Good thing we can rely on congress to do pointless stuff...).
Either way I plan on getting up after the sun rises.
Offender (defendant): So, in conclusion I would argue that thereto and therefore the officer could not have accurately observed my vehicle with precision given that the uncertainty priciple means that
Judge: Sir, you not a particle.
Offender (defendant): (Silence)
I'm always astounded by all the backseat drivers of the world who always know so much better what people should do, without ever feeling the need to do it themselves.
Talk is cheap. So, take it for what its worth.
Like backseat drivers, don't let yourself get distracted by them if you don't find value in the content of their ideas. Unless of course if the backseat driver is telling you that the bridge ahead is out, then you might want to take notice.
Yeah, right, give me a break - as opposed to China, the US doesn't have eminent domain, - the US government respects your property.
I never made the comparison. I never said that the US was any better than China regarding government respect for people's freedoms. Freedom is an absolute good relative only to itself. Sure we can go through and compare how each government violates freedom of its citizens for its own corrupt convenience, that isn't the point.
It is not a choice between freedom and educating children. It is not a choice between freedom and establishing and maintaining rights of way and bulding bridges. It is not a choice between freedom and security. These are all false choices. It is a false yin and yang. The chinese leadership is merely playing politics as any other western poltician would. Rather than looking at all the government takes away, they would rather show you what it gives.
It is an argument that you can always make, but it is a false argument. Look at how many good things the Roman's gave those they conquered, the roads the bridges, the systems of laws, many material things. The Eurpoean colonial powers could say the same. The USA tries to say the same about Iraq now. Look at how many governments conquer their own people everyday. Look at Turkmenistan and know how power corrupts. There have always been and will always be corruption, but to say that a government faces a choice between providing education or any other service and providing freedom is false. Governments don't provide freedom, they can only take it away.
That is an important point. The physics and exeriments with fusion used in weapons clearly show us that there can be a net usuable energy gain by converting matter to photons. We need to figure out the shielding and containment so we can do it without blowing ourselves up or cooking us.
So, fusion is now more an engineering problem, more so than one of fundamental physics. Other conceptual energy sources have much more fundamental problems with supply.
Maybe there are still some questions about ethanol, but if you get less energy out than you (versus the sun) put in, then it should be considered as an energy carrier not a source. Therefore it should be considered in the same category as things like power lines... it has a certain loss along the way, but also certain features which should be compared to other conveyances. Economics can figure this out, if it costs more to produce than it is worth, then likely you have some loss or inefficiency along the way. The science is just a sanity check.
He said, yes, freedom and liberty are important, but he believes, to a chinese person, even before he gets his full freedom, he'd rather have an education.
Sure and that is why we don't give full legal freedom to children. But at some point children must grow up and take on responsibility for their own lives and choices. That is what freedom is about.
You, communism and many western politicians present us with a false choice, between freedom and other things.
But freedom as it concerns a government is seperate from material things provided to people, but rather it is the concept that people have natural rights that the government will not take away. Freedom is that people are not arbitrarily interfered with by the government when they communicate with one another. Freedom is that people are not forced to perform work for others or by the government. Freedom is that people are not prevented by the government from moving or relocating from one place to another nor are they forced to do so. Freedom is that people be secure in their person and property and not be forced by the government to do anything to their bodies or give up their possessions.
Freedom is not about what a government can do for people, but what the government can't do to people.
You present a false dichotomy.
"I think it's important to first make the existing problems go away rather than jump head-first into groundbreaking technology without considering potential problems, though that's how it has always been."
I hope you are joking... so you really think we should just stop making and buying computers until the bugs are worked out. Or is your theory not limited to computer technology and you wouldn't allow us to have cars until they can make one that can't crash or heat our houses until they can make a furnace that won't ever malfunction and cause a fire. Let me get that straight, no new technology until all problems with current technology are figured out and potential problems with new technology are considered and figured out?
I ask you, no beg you, to follow your own advice and please stop using your computer until all the bugs are worked out.
Please either mod the parent back down or funny, but "Insighful" comments like that give me the willies.
It could be quite sometime til the cork is pulled - a few thousand years? - but sooner or later it happens.
That's like 3 weeks in Internet time.
"There are a lot of things we could do right now to cut down on foreign oil dependency and greenhouse gas emissions:require better fuel efficiency from new cars, move more quickly towards hybrid vehicles, put in more commuter trains and subways, make cities better designed for walking and cycling."
Yes, redesigning our cities is really something that can be done "right now". And designing new cars with new technology doesn't take time either. I'm sure if your city put in an order for new trains they could have them Fedexed overnight and have them working the next day. I'm sure by the time I've finished completing this sentence all our energy dependence would have been taken care of.
"But auto makers and oil companies would lose out. So instead, they throw a few million bucks at hydrogen technologies, and that lets them say "see, we really give a shit!" and then keep building monstrosities of excess like the Hummer 2."
Personally, I prefer the H3 . Now that is a cool car.
Much as I would love to generate my own electricity, a wind turbine isn't likely to be allowed by my town.
I just put one up once a couple years ago, didn't ask permission, apparently the building inspector got a call about it but he said that he didn't see a problem with it... I was all ready to use a "decorative" defense as I was not using it to power my house and it was just above the existing roofline just did a few experiments with it and such, but it wasn't necessary.
However, Make sure it has wind braking or its natural rpms are low enough. The one I used started making the loudest most terrible sound I've ever heard at 4 am one morning during a rain and wind storm. Neighbors never complained, but I was up trying to stop the damn thing. Ended up wrecking the blades just to get it to stop.
With wind turbines bigger is better, both for power generation and noise.
Well, fair use does include redistribution for certain purposes like news reporting. But archives seem to be more restricted.
Maybe copyright law does need an update here.
I still outfit every computer i build with a floppy. Only 10 bucks, and you never know when it'll come in handy.
Well you never know when 10 bucks will come in handy either.
"I'm really sick and tired of companies that have absolutely no clue how the Internet and the world wide web works putting up sites and then expecting you to never cache them anywhere. They have this old mentality that they control the flow of information and frankly, that's just not true anymore."
It was never true and companies and lawyers know very well by now how the internet works. This is just another example of people getting pissed off over something and getting their lawyers to try and trick judges into using the law inappropriately to retaliate against someone.
I have the legal right to download the content of the entire internet and make fair use of it and so does the Internet Archive.
And to add, is this really going to be the right solution for a 50 person company? And depending on how your organization is structured it might not even make sense for a 10,000 person company. My guess is that there is some sort of oscillating value curve as an organization scales which goes back and forth between cetralized mangement versus distributed.
The whole point about having a pc on someone's desk is besides the point i think, since you can remotely manage that desktop. And if space is really a consideration then you can always get a Mac Mini. Some organizations will want to be more tightly managed and cost will be a greater consideration and something like this might make sense as an investment over a number of years, else performance might be the greatest consideration and you will certainly be better off going with general workstations and replacing them more frequently.
Not to mention, they're big, ugly, and loud, and kill birds [insidebayarea.com] as shown in recent articles.
big quiet and beautiful and zero bird deaths located along the coastal atlantic flyway:
http://www.hullwind.org/
And most people live somewhat near the coast where winds are higher on the open water.
The secret is no secret anymore, you just have to build the turbines big enough so they are quiet and the towers need to be smooth so that birds aren't building nests in the support structure.
It is not the only solution but it can be a practical contributor for the energy needs of some communities.
If sgi had offered competive sub $1000 linux pre installed workstations with their name and design attached, i'd buy.
They could have been in a growing market instead of a shrinking one.
Are you suggesting ability to apply mod points to the original slashdot story? Maybe "Dupe" could be one of the options with a place to link to the original story. Maybe use all 5 mod points for a mega mod or something like that.
This is certainly offtopic, so Slashdot Editors should open up a discussion on feature requests, most would probably be pretty wild and self defeating, but there could be a few gems.
It's even more than that. The wireless router received a standard, "can I have legitimate credentials on this network?" request in the form of a DHCP lease request. The wireless router replied with valid credentials for that network. The user did not make any malformed requests, did not use any information that he should not have rightfully posessed, and in no way forced his way into the network.
He also properly followed FCC rules regarding the use of wireless equipment.
If the owner of a wireless transceiver, a radio if you will, doesn't want to let that device communicate then they bear the burden of making it not communicate. If they leave it in a mode that allows any public access over frequencies that belong to the public-at-large then they bear the responsibility.
Well said.
And since many people provide open access to their wireless networks as a public service there should be no presumption that the person believed they were not authorized. What the person might have been doing parked in a car using the internet... well I'll admit I'm suspicious, but there are a lot of good and legal reasons that someone would want to maintain anonymity. Heck maybe this person is having a romance with a chinese political activist and keeps getting blocked by the great firewall. Not likely but possible
He should not be charged with this, but if some illegal activity does get traced back to this person't network, then we would at least have a suspect.