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User: jklovanc

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  1. Re:If they were manned aircraft would it be an iss on FAA Bill Authorizes Surveillance Drones Over US · · Score: 1

    Some aircraft still use hydraulic assist mechanical controls.

    And if there is air coming in from the outside which displaces the CO2?

    Cameras don't work well when the only frame of reference is the air frame on a white cloud. A human can sense pitch yaw, roll, acceleration, etc. Cameras can not sense those things. The human senses fail a lot less often then mechanical or electrical sensors.

    Cargo jet aircraft are much more complex than a drone. Take a look at the cockpit and try to imagine remotely controlling all those switches and transmitting all the information from all those gauges and instruments. It is not a simple feat.

  2. Re:Don't worry on FAA Bill Authorizes Surveillance Drones Over US · · Score: 1

    You seem to forget that flight time for a drone is not 0 cost. There is a police officer piloting the drone at all time which mean three officers for 24 hour surveillance. A large police department would have maybe a dozen drones. Two of which would have to be tasked to watch one person (they would have to hand off so the suspect is not lost). There is no way a police department would allocate those kind of resources to watch a "suspicious" person.

  3. Re:If they were manned aircraft would it be an iss on FAA Bill Authorizes Surveillance Drones Over US · · Score: 1

    It's only a matter of time between the introduction of drones and when someone (actual criminals or just ya-hoos) starts shooting at them. When that happens, law enforcement will up the ante by arming the drones.

    How do you know what law enforcement will do? Are you psychic? How about if they do arm drones then we protest. Like all slippery slope arguments this one stops a good thing because a bad decision may be made later. By this logic we should not arm police because they might shoot an innocent person. Slipper slope arguments are logically false.

    The pilot may refuse the order, then again, he may not. Want to bet your life on which he chooses? WWII (and likely all wars) provided many stories about those who were just following orders.

    You missed the point completely. The GF was stating that a manned aircraft was better because a pilot could refuse an order. I was just pointing out that a UAV also has a pilot who could refuse the order.

    How about we don't allow drone overflights so this can't escalate into more loss of our rights and other tragedies?

    you do not seem to have an issue with manned overflights. What is the difference if the aircraft is unmanned with the pilot on the ground?

  4. Re:If they were manned aircraft would it be an iss on FAA Bill Authorizes Surveillance Drones Over US · · Score: 1

    I didn't see anywhere in the article about allowing armed attack drones in US airspace. It is about surveillance drones. I doubt very much that it is legal for an armed aircraft to shoot at a civilian in the US. The same laws would go for drones.

    Secondly there is still a pilot that just happens not to be in the aircraft. That pilot can refuse the order just the same as if he was in the cockpit.

    How about you object to what is actually being proposed rather than a scenario that is illegal under many other laws.

  5. Re:If they were manned aircraft would it be an iss on FAA Bill Authorizes Surveillance Drones Over US · · Score: 1

    I would really like to see that remote pilot use his muscles to steer the aircraft when some or all of the hydraulics go out. Or get the fire extinguisher out when a short causes a minor fire. Or confirm the actual conditions when a sensor malfunctions. None of these things can be done from the ground.

  6. Re:News? on The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities · · Score: 1

    "I certainly don't think you can impute an opinion to *everyone* in a society from the actions of a few."
    Agreed as I have stated about the existence of sociopaths in all societies. On the other had it would take more than a few to destroy a University and also more than a few to stand by while it happens. Where were the students, professors, neighbors, etc. when the looting was happening? How many of these people were part of the looting?

    Bushido is present in all levels of Japanese culture and not just the ruling class. For example I talked to a friend who left a camera in a restaurant in Japan for three days. When he went back it was in exactly the same place he had left it. He asked the waiter why it was there and he stated that since it didn't belong to him he left it alone and was sure the owner would return to get it. Do that in LA and the camera would be gone in 30 seconds.

  7. Re:Do you ever wonder... on BigDog Robot Gets Much Bigger · · Score: 1

    I thought about that too but then realized that you can not put a mule in a crate, take it out a month later and expect it to perform. Animals take a lot more maintenance than machines and they do not transport well on unpressurized aircraft.

  8. Re:Proving something negative is impossible on $100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible · · Score: 2

    Also, it is definitely possible to prove a negative. I can prove that there are no lions in my refrigerator, no elephants hiding behind my couch, and no dead zombie typing this comment, to most people's satisfaction, for starters.

    One can not prove a negative but one can disprove a negative. To prove a hypothesis one must reduce the hypothesis to something that is already proven or traverse the set of all possible outcomes and prove the the hypothesis hold for all possible outcomes. It only takes one counter example to disprove a hypothesis but it is much harder to prove a hypothesis.

    The reason the cited hypotheses are provable is that the set of possibilities is finite and easily traversed. The issue with proving that quantum computers is impossible is that one would have to prove that all possible combinations of today's technologies and future technologies can not produce scaleable quantum computing. To disprove that hypothesis one would just have to find a scalable quantum computing technology.

    I guess a better description is "it is impossible to prove a negative when the positive has not been dis-proven". For example, The positive of "there are no elephants behind my couch" would be "There are elephants behind my couch". The positive is easily dis-proven by looking behind the couch. In the quantum computing issue the positive would be "There is a scalable quantum computing technology" and that has yet to be disproved.

  9. Re:News? on The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities · · Score: 1

    Belief in authority can certainly be culturally inculcated, but there are limits.

    You missed my point completely. You keep talking about "belief in authority"; what I am talking about is the belief in personal responsibility for one's own actions. If a society is composed of people who are personally responsible for their own actions and have the honour to do what is right there will be very little unrest when authority breaks down. It is about honour; not authority. As I understand bushido, it is all about being responsible for one's actions and one's honour is more important than one's life.

  10. Re:News? on The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities · · Score: 1

    Can you cite any report of looting in Japan after the tsunami? The only instance of "looting" I have seen was this ant that falls under my "necessary supplies" exception. Some may say that beer is not necessary but when most of the potable water in the area has been contaminated bottled beer is a safe alternative.
    The other issue is that in every society there will be people who do not follow the social norms; they are called sociopaths. Are there sociopaths in Japan? There sure is. My point is that the social norm in Japan is to not loot. The social norm in most other societies is to loot.

  11. Re:News? on The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We know that in sudden, widespread disruptive events people loot. It doesn't matter whether it is natural disaster, invasion, or just a neighborhood breakdown in public order.

    I am sorry but that is a false assertion. It is not a human condition, it is a societal condition. Almost all cultures, mine included, have the idea of "get what you can any way you can get it". They hold the individual above all else. In effect most people are anarchists held in check by laws and controls. When those laws and controls weaken the anarchy comes out. If in one's mind the only thing that stops one from taking someone else's property is the law then when the law can not be enforced one will take it. One the other hand, if the reason one does not take something is the simple fact that it does not belong to you is a different issue. The presence or absence of law enforcement does not change that criteria and one would not take the item in either condition. It has nothing to do with society but with one's individual view of the world.

    There is at least one society on earth where that is not anarchist at heart. When a disaster happened there was no looting, no rioting and the people obeyed what little authority that was there. That society was Japan during the last tsunami.

    Another point is that I am a human and would never loot and hoard. I may recouver resources necessary for survival but I would use them to help as many people as possible and not hoard them as most looters do.

    In the end it is all about the lack of personal honour, personal responsibility, personal control and a reliance on the state to keep one's caveman instincts in check. Japan has evolved beyond that. In those aspect I wish that my society had as well.

  12. Re:Shit Happens on Mechanic's Mistake Trashes $244 Million Aircraft · · Score: 1

    That is the point. There was in effect a burst disk, in this case a relief vent, that the maintenance person removed and replaced with a plug. He may have been doing pressure testing looking for leaks. What should have happened was theworker should have counted the number of plugs installed vs the number of plugs removed and noticed a difference.

  13. Re:5Th Ammendment on US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    Yup, crack it.

    Sorry but the whole premise of you statements is off. She is using Symantec PGP which is uncrackable. Everything else after that is irrelevant as the encryption is still there.

    Photos? How does a photo of a hard drive prove that the data on the drive has not been manipulated?

    You continue to miss the point. It is not about police in the field; it is about the drive once it is in the evidence locker and needs to be accessed to get data off of. That is where the tampering will take place if it does. An investigator signs the drive out, manipulated tha data and signs the drive back in. The picture if the drive does not change.

    The hurry is that there is no way to decrypt the drive without the password and someone who has stolen thousands if not millions of dollars from hard working people may get away with it just because she used PGP. The people who lost the money sure would not agree with it. There is also the issue with due process. One can not charge someone and wait a couple of years while an NSA computer cracks the encryption before going to trial. The case would be thrown out. There is also a statute of limitations to watch.

  14. Re:5Th Ammendment on US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    1. The drive is encrypted so file copy will not work though a disk image might.
    2. Even if "cp-rp" worked, prove that that the drive was not tampered with before the copy was done.
    3. Any good hacker can manipulate date stamps using a sector editor( read a sector, manipulate the bits, write the sector. That did not go through the file system so no time stamp info written).
    4. Who is to say that the data was not manipulated after the decryption was done. One can not compare it with the original as it is encrypted.
    Basically, and competent hacker can manipulate the data and no one would ever know.

  15. Re:5Th Ammendment on US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    Not even close! Pretty much any cop car these days has a CCTV camera. We've been using "evidence tags" for hundreds of years now. Any cop doing anything "interesting" these days may be uploaded to Youtube any minute now, and what's the resolution of that satellite's spy cam? "Did we have a drone in the area at the time?"

    What I am talking about is evidence that is in the hands of the police at police stations.
    "Pretty much any cop car these days has a CCTV camera.". Is there a CCTV camera pointing at every desk, office, lunch room, bathroom stall, etc in a police station? A police officer could sign out evidence, tamper with it and sign it back in.
    "Evidence tags"; All an evidence tag does is record what the item is. In this case the tag would say "encrypted computer hard drive". It does noting to protect it from tampering. Even the seals do not prevent tampering. All they do is record who accessed the information and that the "chain of custody" has not been broken. In fact, trust is the basis of chain of custody. If someone signs for a piece of evidence that are trusted not to tamper with it.
    "YouTube"; There are a great many "interesting" YouTube videos but that are of police interacting with people not evidence. There would be no videos of someone changing data on the hard drive as it would not be done in a public place.
    "satellites and drones"; They don't work inside buildings.

    My point is that there are many ways evidence can be tampered with while in police custody. There is always at least one technique that is not detectable and proving that the technique was not used is impossible. If criteria is that the police have to prove that evidence has not been tampered with then no evidence will be admissible as there is no way of proving the negative.

  16. Re:What If? on Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years · · Score: 1

    Sorry but the guy you quote would require a team of detectives to monitor the defendant for years. Would you authorize that? Planning does not need to be conspiracy. Also, the act described in the quoted post, heinous though it may be, would not lead to the death of a number of people and the destruction of millions of dollars of property. The scale if the issue is very different.

    Detective work is to find out what happened; not follow someone until they do something. When one is talking about a bomb exploding "detective work" is too late.

  17. Re:What If? on Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years · · Score: 1

    And how will you know he got a physical gun and/or bomb material if he gets in contact with some third party who gives it to him?

  18. Re:What If? on Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years · · Score: 1

    Only works if he buys the material. What if he is given the material from a third party? Watch lists would be useless in that case.

    I agree that we will never be absolutly secure. But there is a line that the guy crossed and that was the letter. I agree that information alone is not enough but information plus a letter of intent is enough in my opinion. Best case scenario they saved the lives of a number of people. Worst case scenario they put an idiot in jail for two years.

  19. Re:What If? on Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years · · Score: 1

    Compared to millions of dollars in damage and the loss of life it seems a bargain to me.

  20. Re:knowing how != going to do/use! on Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years · · Score: 1

    Apparently, the fact that I know that you can harvest reasonably high quality platinum catayst from a defunct catayltic converter from a scrap yard, and use it to create nitric acid for creating IEDs from dryer lint and stale urine means I should be arrested.

    For that knowledge, No. Couple that with a letter to a known terrorist organization offering to blow something up, yes you should be arrested.

    Another point is that you are probably a chemist and this kind of knowledge is common in your profession. It is not common for a person like the one arrested to have this kind of knowledge.

  21. What If? on Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years · · Score: 1

    What if the police had found the information, done nothing (it is only information) and a year he blew up a building and then gunned down the first responders? How many of you "He shouldn't go to jail just for information" people would be calling the police incompetant for not doing anything? And no, the police to not have the resources to keep watch on suspects for long periods of time.

  22. Re:Non-transparency or a bad website? on Object Lesson in Non-Transparency At Energy.gov · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ever heard the phrase "one catches more flies with honey that with vinager". Instead of accusing the site of being "not transparent" maybe she could have stated that search engin needs fixing and suggesting exactly how to do it.

    Another issue is that she is looking for a ten-year old document from an Office that was closed and all documents transferred to Legacy Management. If the documents were transferred in electronic form, as they should be, it is up to LM to put them up in searchable format. The OP's issue should be with LM and not Energy.gov.

    By the way, just because one can not instantly download any document created in the last ten years does not mean the government is not transparent. It just means that they have not dealt with the millions of legacy documents.

  23. Re:5Th Ammendment on US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    Then why the statement that the cops have to "PROVE" that a hard drive has not been tampered with while in their possesion? The drive was taken from the suspect's possesion. After that it has only been in police possesion. If it has been tampered with It must have been tampered with while in police posession.

  24. Re:5Th Ammendment on US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    You may like cops but from the following statement you don't trust them. "It has been in legal custody since then and we have not tampered with it.Prove it. I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU." By those standards no one could ever be convicted of anything as any evidence in the possession of the police may have been tampered with. You know it is impossible to prove a negative; "Prove you have never smoked pot".

    You just dont understand the Fourth Amendment which is more applicable than the Fifth in this case. The Fourth is about illegal search and seizure. All that is necessary for a search warrant is probable cause and not proof.

    Yeah, I am going to create a password on a drive that I have used multiple times a day for months and conveniently forget it when the computer is seized. Sorry but that is not plausible.

  25. Re:no 5th? on US Judge Rules Defendant Can Be Forced To Decrypt Hard Drive · · Score: 1

    By your standard there would never be a search warrant ever signed. The criteria for a search warrant is that probable cause exists and the investigators want to search for evidence. There is no need for proof that something exists for it to be searched for; just "a reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime". If there is "a reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime" anything related to that person may be searched. The judge signing the warrant is a statement that the judge agrees that there is enough evidence to support that "reasonable belief".

    What you describe is a retrieval warrant "We know something is there and we want written authority to retrieve it"