The problem is that by having a dialogue, people do not become convinced of this fact.
Once people with acceptably good thinking skills understand the subject, continually "debating" with people that prefer to continue to reject reality is a waste of time. They are more than happy to waste enormous amounts of time, but most scientists aren't terribly interested in spending their careers arguing well-understood biology with fundamentalists.
I don't remember my biology too well, but this highlights a problem with making meat-in-a-vat: many necessary chemicals come from other parts of the body. Aren't cholesterols synthesized away from the muscle and brought in by the bloodstream?
To be honest, if you're planning on sharing illegal information, it'd be a lot smarter to use a highly inconvenient but secure method than simply hope you don't get caught but get great download speeds.
While it's true that one can change file names to *anything*, not necessarily reflecting the content, it's also true that file names are by far the dominant metadata field searched against on peer-to-peer networks. In order for someone to effectively find content about X, the filename -- or some other metadata field -- must reflect its content of X. If you move to other searchable metadata, they can simply have a look at the value of those.
It's the general problem that while it's certainly possible to invent dozens of ways to make a single transfer where both parties know secret information incomprehensible to a third party, this is not really possible on a very open network, because the people who may be interested in accessing your content only have access to public information -- and so do the people that want to catch you.
a) As the writers of the software, it's their prerogative to determine what it's named. If you think "mTorrent" is more appropriate than "uTorrent", nobody particularly cares. b) The person who replied to you is not me. But at least we can see you're skilled in jumping to conclusions. Good work!
I'm pretty sure you're not too clear on what "top 1% means". Note that I never said the top 1% and bottom 1% are equidistant from some average or that they occupy similarly-sized ranges.
It's actually quite easy to compare the two peer-to-peer models.
There are multiple steps in finding and downloading content that's shared in a peer-to-peer fashion. Napster sort of pioneered this with a centralized search across a pool of peers and direct transfers between the peers. Gnutella-like networks still use simplistic transfer systems but have increasingly advanced decentralized content-searching networks. BitTorrent ignores the problem of finding content, has a simple model for finding peers, and has a very effective transfer method. They're solving different parts of a single procedure.
Now, if that's where it stopped, maybe you could say they're not much alike. But BitTorrent clients are starting to implement decentralized peer-exchange and searching protocols, and content-searching networks are starting to implement more advanced, BitTorrent-like transfer protocols. That makes comparison, as well as grouping them into the same category, quite easy.
Really, though, despite mechanical differences, they're easy to put together into a category because they are used for a common purpose -- peer-to-peer file sharing. In the same way, Samba, FTP, and SCP are nothing alike, yet they're used for a common application.
I've taken both kinds of test drives. Probably, a combination of people preferring to test the car without someone watching over their shoulder and excluding that car salesman from performing other tasks makes the cost of dealing with the occasional car theft (against which the dealership presumably has insurance) low -- particularly since the dealership has all the necessary data about the car handy, can report it quite quickly, has multiple people who have seen the perpetrator up close, and hopefully have some (probably fake) identification.
It is, and it's a major difference that has no bearing on whether or not you can positively associate IPs with people or locations.
A private company may have less access to the necessary information. At the very least it requires an investigative license and probably tons of other paperwork.
For criminal activity, having evidence that it's your computer/network responsible (IP address + log from ISP) should be sufficient to seize and investigate your computer and networking hardware, which may be able to corroborate that it was you, and not someone else using your network, that performed the action (and potentially will also demonstrate intent).
This is more correct. An IP address can be used to identify a location. With corroborating evidence, an IP address (coupled with, say, timestamps for the activity, logs from the ISP, and evidence from the suspect's computer) can even be used as a component of identifying a particular user responsible for an action. However, there's no absolute guarantee -- particularly if you are denied access (perhaps due to it never being recorded) to necessary pieces of information.
While it's true that sometimes "you cannot determine the user or location associated with this IP", it's also true that sometimes you can do exactly that.
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The problem is that by having a dialogue, people do not become convinced of this fact.
Once people with acceptably good thinking skills understand the subject, continually "debating" with people that prefer to continue to reject reality is a waste of time. They are more than happy to waste enormous amounts of time, but most scientists aren't terribly interested in spending their careers arguing well-understood biology with fundamentalists.
"Scientists are naturally skeptic but being a scientist AND being open to the idea of ID is difficult at best."
Indeed. It's much like how being sighted and open to the idea of the sky being green is difficult at best.
So if I provide just a single example of when a group of scientists did change their mind, does that make this balanced?
Also, does my example need to also be from ages past, or would your prefer something reasonably modern?
I don't remember my biology too well, but this highlights a problem with making meat-in-a-vat: many necessary chemicals come from other parts of the body. Aren't cholesterols synthesized away from the muscle and brought in by the bloodstream?
They have those. It's printed in a separate book. Often books are even published only in this version!
They should be using nitrile, anyhow.
To be honest, if you're planning on sharing illegal information, it'd be a lot smarter to use a highly inconvenient but secure method than simply hope you don't get caught but get great download speeds.
Best comment ever.
While it's true that one can change file names to *anything*, not necessarily reflecting the content, it's also true that file names are by far the dominant metadata field searched against on peer-to-peer networks. In order for someone to effectively find content about X, the filename -- or some other metadata field -- must reflect its content of X. If you move to other searchable metadata, they can simply have a look at the value of those.
It's the general problem that while it's certainly possible to invent dozens of ways to make a single transfer where both parties know secret information incomprehensible to a third party, this is not really possible on a very open network, because the people who may be interested in accessing your content only have access to public information -- and so do the people that want to catch you.
a) As the writers of the software, it's their prerogative to determine what it's named. If you think "mTorrent" is more appropriate than "uTorrent", nobody particularly cares.
b) The person who replied to you is not me. But at least we can see you're skilled in jumping to conclusions. Good work!
I'm pretty sure you're not too clear on what "top 1% means". Note that I never said the top 1% and bottom 1% are equidistant from some average or that they occupy similarly-sized ranges.
Oddly, their domain name and the name of the executable are both "uTorrent".
I'm thinking that "mTorrent" would be less accurate according to them.
Actually, for every 1% at the top, there's 1% at the bottom, regardless of the distribution function.
It's actually quite easy to compare the two peer-to-peer models.
There are multiple steps in finding and downloading content that's shared in a peer-to-peer fashion. Napster sort of pioneered this with a centralized search across a pool of peers and direct transfers between the peers. Gnutella-like networks still use simplistic transfer systems but have increasingly advanced decentralized content-searching networks. BitTorrent ignores the problem of finding content, has a simple model for finding peers, and has a very effective transfer method. They're solving different parts of a single procedure.
Now, if that's where it stopped, maybe you could say they're not much alike. But BitTorrent clients are starting to implement decentralized peer-exchange and searching protocols, and content-searching networks are starting to implement more advanced, BitTorrent-like transfer protocols. That makes comparison, as well as grouping them into the same category, quite easy.
Really, though, despite mechanical differences, they're easy to put together into a category because they are used for a common purpose -- peer-to-peer file sharing. In the same way, Samba, FTP, and SCP are nothing alike, yet they're used for a common application.
LimeWire is certainly the most-often-seen P2P client in police investigations.
I've taken both kinds of test drives. Probably, a combination of people preferring to test the car without someone watching over their shoulder and excluding that car salesman from performing other tasks makes the cost of dealing with the occasional car theft (against which the dealership presumably has insurance) low -- particularly since the dealership has all the necessary data about the car handy, can report it quite quickly, has multiple people who have seen the perpetrator up close, and hopefully have some (probably fake) identification.
No -- as people apparently don't want to declare war on other countries these days, we have, technically, never been at war with Iraq.
Bear in mind, of course, that the actual funding of schools is done at the state and local level, whereas NASA's budget is NASA's budget.
To be fair, allocating federal funding to pre-kindergarten education is pretty damn unlikely to buy any K-12 teachers.
Not true -- the secondary results of the space program are very valuable compared to the cost of running it.
Quite a few Americans agree that radical and disruptive is exactly what we need.
It is, and it's a major difference that has no bearing on whether or not you can positively associate IPs with people or locations.
A private company may have less access to the necessary information. At the very least it requires an investigative license and probably tons of other paperwork.
For criminal activity, having evidence that it's your computer/network responsible (IP address + log from ISP) should be sufficient to seize and investigate your computer and networking hardware, which may be able to corroborate that it was you, and not someone else using your network, that performed the action (and potentially will also demonstrate intent).
This is more correct. An IP address can be used to identify a location. With corroborating evidence, an IP address (coupled with, say, timestamps for the activity, logs from the ISP, and evidence from the suspect's computer) can even be used as a component of identifying a particular user responsible for an action. However, there's no absolute guarantee -- particularly if you are denied access (perhaps due to it never being recorded) to necessary pieces of information.
While it's true that sometimes "you cannot determine the user or location associated with this IP", it's also true that sometimes you can do exactly that.
Where'd you get 62%? Only 20% of the poll respondents claimed they used these drugs.