If looking up the conversion ratios between oz and lb is slowing you down, you're probably a terrible engineer.
Not to mention that very, very little engineering work actually involves converting between units within a system. Often when you do, it's not for simple units (like metric megatons to kilos), but for complex ones (horsepower to foot-pounds per second, or ergs to joules) where you may not want to trust it to memory for SI, even.
That SI is based on powers of ten is probably the last thing on an engineer's mind. Rather, it's "what units do other parts and specifications use" and "what units do the tools and technicians use". In the US, (b) is generally Imperial units, although many shops can use both sets of units. The more important one is (a), since any earlier components made in the US will be in Imperial, many components purchased in the US will be Imperial, and any components or specifications from other countries will probably be in metric.
Simply reporting the "obvious" turns out not to be nearly as effective at obtaining useful information as performing studies. Of course, sometimes your studies show that the obvious answer was correct, but you don't know which studies those are a priori. (Also, while often summarized into simple, seemingly-simple statements, most studies gather substantially more useful information than the one-line summary.)
If they actually put it in working thermoses, it would stay hot for hours even if it started at an acceptable temperature. My thermos, for example, will keep drinking-temperature coffee at about the same temperature for at least 10 hours.
The average quantity of material ejected by volcanoes is small compared to human production, particularly when talking about greenhouse gases, which are long-term agents. Ash is a short-term agent, and volcanoes are well-known to produce their materials in short bursts. They can certainly cause dramatic short-term problems. In terms of greenhouse gas production, though, they are not a large force.
It's a second trial. As Ray points out, there's no chance of the motion succeeding, but to play Devil's advocate: I think the reason the first trial was thrown out is an incorrect jury instruction ("making available"). In theory, I suppose you could argue this could be rectified without substantial deviation from the original trial.
Er, no. The best a "duress key" can offer you is plausible deniability, like TrueCrypt. It can't offer provable deniability, it isn't really within the purview of encryption, and often forensic procedures can significant erode the plausible deniability.
Well, in this scenario, they're already running it on a live machine (though perhaps a live machine that's just been booted up, TrueCrypt not mounted). Otherwise, asking for the software on a USB stick would be a little silly.
But yes, even if the software magically appeared in their hands, it would require a lot of changes to get the people seizing computers to run the digital breathalyzer first.
They're probably not interested in the difficult (or impossible) problem of a comptuer criminal that's actually competent. If their computer forensic teams are anything like ours are in the U.S., they're spending a week or two per computer doing legally-sound forensic analysis of the computers of people who are morons and store their 10,000-image collection of child pornography in a directory on their desktop called "Kiddie Porn". It would be quite useful for them if there was something that would quickly produce a reasonably reliable "definitely bad stuff here", "possibly no bad stuff here", and "this one requires further investigation". (As many of the convenient encryption and some convenient steganography systems are reasonably detectable, having a "strange things were detected" choice is helpful.)
The likelihood of that actually working in court is very low. Generally if they're presenting evidence of illegal activity, a forensic examiner has to give testimony in court. The explanation, "this tool told me there was evidence" is far too insufficient. At least among the investigators I've worked with, none of them would use such a tool to find court-ready evidence if it didn't lay out low-level details of the findings, because they need to have those low-level details available at trial. (Plus, the direct results of tools are notoriously hard to certify. Trusting uncertified tools is great ammunition for the defense lawyers.)
Now, granted, if having your computer siezed, taking a trip to jail, and hiring a lawyer aren't your idea of fun, you may well still be concerned about such a tool saying "this guy has incriminating material", since the cop on the scene using the tool probably won't have the training and certainly won't have the time to look at anything other than what the tool tells him.
Pro tip, though, in case you didn't already know: don't let police search your computer without a warrant. For some reason, quite a few people do.
It's easy in the U.S., too, just not as useful. If the TrueCrypt drive is mounted, just search it. If it's not, maybe you can say, "Hey, they have a TrueCrypt drive", but that's about it.
The problem is that some applications assume a behavior that is not supported by the POSIX definitions (the guarantees provided by the OS functions they're calling). However, it happens to be the behavior on existing filesystems and happens to be convenient. Now a new filesystem comes along and sticks to the POSIX definitions but does not follow this behavior. Application breaks, people complain.
As a simplified example, imagine you create file B, then delete file A. Existing filesystems happen to do this in order, so you always have at least one of A or B. (If the system crashed partway through, you might have both A and B.) Your application fails if neither A nor B is present. POSIX doesn't require that the operations be performed in order. New filesystem comes along and sometimes does them in the reverse order, so if the system crashes at the wrong time, neither A nor B is left on the filesystem.
Actually, part of our safety training was to learn that if someone suggests that you should shortcut safety procedures (like working alone), you tell them to fuck off. If they insist, you notify safety personnel (which nobody wants to happen).
it's about how academia considers safety as an afterthought
These people were clearly working in a department other than the one I was a grad student in. There were fairly extensive chemical and radiological safety and security measures, and fairly good machine-shop safety measures.
Of course, as far as I know, there aren't too many safety issues in computer science.
No, it's linear -- just the police enter in twice. The police executing the warrant acted in good faith, as a judge signed the warrant. The judge signed the warrant in good faith, assuming that the police provided him with appropriate information. In this case, the latter "the police" could well be different from the former. The former are shielded from liability, but the latter aren't.
In this case, the problem the upper court had was that the actions (sending out e-mail) were insufficient for the charge (illegally accessing a computer system). In this case, the most-likely target is whoever made the decision that those actions were sufficient for that charge. (Realistically, there will probably be no action against the state, provided he gets his equipment back in a timely fashion.)
Well, with seized electronic equipment, you should certainly get it back, and in the condition it was seized in. Now of course, you likely won't get it back until after it's no longer needed as evidence. (A business may be able to demonstrate that the loss of the equipment significantly impacts their ability to do business, and have a judge order the originals returned after duplicates are made.) If it's an illicit-data case, your equipment will be returned scrubbed of all data. (See n.b. above re: businesses.) If you're convicted, you generally don't get your stuff back.
If you don't get your equipment back and in working order, you have good grounds to sue the police. At least among the computer forensic analysts I know, this is certainly a concern. A number of procedures -- like jailbreaking an iPhone to get its data -- are potentially destructive to the equipment and are avoided because the device may need to be returned to its owner.
The -Caches- directory has actually been around since 10.5 and some 3+ version of Safari. It's not exclusive to Safari, though Safari does put cached information there. Your individual -Caches- path does have the proper permissions. The only real problem is that, to my knowledge, if you use FileVault, your Web cache will still be outside your encrypted home directory. (Actually, I think this is why -Caches- is outside of the home directory -- the combination of Time Machine, a FileVault home directory, and an active cache folder cause a lot of Time Machine churn.)
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If looking up the conversion ratios between oz and lb is slowing you down, you're probably a terrible engineer.
Not to mention that very, very little engineering work actually involves converting between units within a system. Often when you do, it's not for simple units (like metric megatons to kilos), but for complex ones (horsepower to foot-pounds per second, or ergs to joules) where you may not want to trust it to memory for SI, even.
That SI is based on powers of ten is probably the last thing on an engineer's mind. Rather, it's "what units do other parts and specifications use" and "what units do the tools and technicians use". In the US, (b) is generally Imperial units, although many shops can use both sets of units. The more important one is (a), since any earlier components made in the US will be in Imperial, many components purchased in the US will be Imperial, and any components or specifications from other countries will probably be in metric.
Oddly, converting from metric to English units has as much to do with the metric system as it does to do with the English system.
Learn the goddam proper terminology ffs.
Simply reporting the "obvious" turns out not to be nearly as effective at obtaining useful information as performing studies. Of course, sometimes your studies show that the obvious answer was correct, but you don't know which studies those are a priori. (Also, while often summarized into simple, seemingly-simple statements, most studies gather substantially more useful information than the one-line summary.)
In my school, we had plenty of teachers who had no degree in Education.
If they actually put it in working thermoses, it would stay hot for hours even if it started at an acceptable temperature. My thermos, for example, will keep drinking-temperature coffee at about the same temperature for at least 10 hours.
First, you can make good iced coffee using cold extraction.
Second, he's actually referring to holding temperature, not brewing temperature (even though he says brewing temperature).
The average quantity of material ejected by volcanoes is small compared to human production, particularly when talking about greenhouse gases, which are long-term agents. Ash is a short-term agent, and volcanoes are well-known to produce their materials in short bursts. They can certainly cause dramatic short-term problems. In terms of greenhouse gas production, though, they are not a large force.
I've been told that following the law isn't necessarily the tactic the RIAA lawyers take.
Seriously, though -- just a thought on how you might attempt to justify it. It has no chance with a judge.
It's a second trial. As Ray points out, there's no chance of the motion succeeding, but to play Devil's advocate: I think the reason the first trial was thrown out is an incorrect jury instruction ("making available"). In theory, I suppose you could argue this could be rectified without substantial deviation from the original trial.
Yes, that is exactly the problem signing the DNS root zone is solving -- SSL certificates.
Pro tip: not all cryptographic and security systems on the Internet are necessarily SSL.
Er, no. The best a "duress key" can offer you is plausible deniability, like TrueCrypt. It can't offer provable deniability, it isn't really within the purview of encryption, and often forensic procedures can significant erode the plausible deniability.
It would stump them, in the sense that they would most likely seize your computer (or get a warrant to do so) rather than bother running the tool.
Well, in this scenario, they're already running it on a live machine (though perhaps a live machine that's just been booted up, TrueCrypt not mounted). Otherwise, asking for the software on a USB stick would be a little silly.
But yes, even if the software magically appeared in their hands, it would require a lot of changes to get the people seizing computers to run the digital breathalyzer first.
They're probably not interested in the difficult (or impossible) problem of a comptuer criminal that's actually competent. If their computer forensic teams are anything like ours are in the U.S., they're spending a week or two per computer doing legally-sound forensic analysis of the computers of people who are morons and store their 10,000-image collection of child pornography in a directory on their desktop called "Kiddie Porn". It would be quite useful for them if there was something that would quickly produce a reasonably reliable "definitely bad stuff here", "possibly no bad stuff here", and "this one requires further investigation". (As many of the convenient encryption and some convenient steganography systems are reasonably detectable, having a "strange things were detected" choice is helpful.)
The likelihood of that actually working in court is very low. Generally if they're presenting evidence of illegal activity, a forensic examiner has to give testimony in court. The explanation, "this tool told me there was evidence" is far too insufficient. At least among the investigators I've worked with, none of them would use such a tool to find court-ready evidence if it didn't lay out low-level details of the findings, because they need to have those low-level details available at trial. (Plus, the direct results of tools are notoriously hard to certify. Trusting uncertified tools is great ammunition for the defense lawyers.)
Now, granted, if having your computer siezed, taking a trip to jail, and hiring a lawyer aren't your idea of fun, you may well still be concerned about such a tool saying "this guy has incriminating material", since the cop on the scene using the tool probably won't have the training and certainly won't have the time to look at anything other than what the tool tells him.
Pro tip, though, in case you didn't already know: don't let police search your computer without a warrant. For some reason, quite a few people do.
Well, on my computer, none of the USB ports are actually connected. So, can anyone do it in less than zero?
It's easy in the U.S., too, just not as useful. If the TrueCrypt drive is mounted, just search it. If it's not, maybe you can say, "Hey, they have a TrueCrypt drive", but that's about it.
The problem is that some applications assume a behavior that is not supported by the POSIX definitions (the guarantees provided by the OS functions they're calling). However, it happens to be the behavior on existing filesystems and happens to be convenient. Now a new filesystem comes along and sticks to the POSIX definitions but does not follow this behavior. Application breaks, people complain.
As a simplified example, imagine you create file B, then delete file A. Existing filesystems happen to do this in order, so you always have at least one of A or B. (If the system crashed partway through, you might have both A and B.) Your application fails if neither A nor B is present. POSIX doesn't require that the operations be performed in order. New filesystem comes along and sometimes does them in the reverse order, so if the system crashes at the wrong time, neither A nor B is left on the filesystem.
Yeah, I live in New York state, and we don't need fingerprints or any kind of license for rifles.
Yes, your heater is greener than your air conditioner.
Actually, part of our safety training was to learn that if someone suggests that you should shortcut safety procedures (like working alone), you tell them to fuck off. If they insist, you notify safety personnel (which nobody wants to happen).
it's about how academia considers safety as an afterthought
These people were clearly working in a department other than the one I was a grad student in. There were fairly extensive chemical and radiological safety and security measures, and fairly good machine-shop safety measures.
Of course, as far as I know, there aren't too many safety issues in computer science.
No, it's linear -- just the police enter in twice. The police executing the warrant acted in good faith, as a judge signed the warrant. The judge signed the warrant in good faith, assuming that the police provided him with appropriate information. In this case, the latter "the police" could well be different from the former. The former are shielded from liability, but the latter aren't.
In this case, the problem the upper court had was that the actions (sending out e-mail) were insufficient for the charge (illegally accessing a computer system). In this case, the most-likely target is whoever made the decision that those actions were sufficient for that charge. (Realistically, there will probably be no action against the state, provided he gets his equipment back in a timely fashion.)
Well, with seized electronic equipment, you should certainly get it back, and in the condition it was seized in. Now of course, you likely won't get it back until after it's no longer needed as evidence. (A business may be able to demonstrate that the loss of the equipment significantly impacts their ability to do business, and have a judge order the originals returned after duplicates are made.) If it's an illicit-data case, your equipment will be returned scrubbed of all data. (See n.b. above re: businesses.) If you're convicted, you generally don't get your stuff back.
If you don't get your equipment back and in working order, you have good grounds to sue the police. At least among the computer forensic analysts I know, this is certainly a concern. A number of procedures -- like jailbreaking an iPhone to get its data -- are potentially destructive to the equipment and are avoided because the device may need to be returned to its owner.
The -Caches- directory has actually been around since 10.5 and some 3+ version of Safari. It's not exclusive to Safari, though Safari does put cached information there. Your individual -Caches- path does have the proper permissions. The only real problem is that, to my knowledge, if you use FileVault, your Web cache will still be outside your encrypted home directory. (Actually, I think this is why -Caches- is outside of the home directory -- the combination of Time Machine, a FileVault home directory, and an active cache folder cause a lot of Time Machine churn.)