All they ask for in this statement is exactly what you said you have no problem with: a reverse mapping of (IP address, time) to customer and customer information (e.g., address).
The problem, they claim, is that ISPs only store this data for short periods of time, which is insufficient. They specifically mention that they are not requesting that ISPs start storing data that they do not already store.
And it will do nothing to catch criminals, because they can just pass all their data through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN provider in another country.
This argument isn't correct. You assume that every criminal will circumvent this measure. That ignores all the criminals who don't (obviously). Given that there are a ton of great ways out there already to avoid getting caught doing bad things on the Internet and lots of criminals don't bother with any of them, it seems likely that lots of criminals also won't bother circumventing ISP logs.
They need to forcibly enter your home or occupied vehicle (rather than just being on your property). Otherwise, Florida's castle doctrine does exactly that.
Clearly, you're not big on empiricism and qualitative reasoning.
The more you have, the better the conclusions.
How much more? How much better? It's very important to know how reliable your results are when you have a limited amount of data and how much additional reliability more data will buy you.
In the example I gave, for instance, even though you have "only" 30 data points, you can be 99.5% confident that your observation is not due to chance.
Naturally, although many cyber attacks right now are done through botnets or are made to look as if they were done by an anonymous, meaningless entity, rather than intentionally placing evidence that leads you to believe it's from a particular third party.
The short version is that vigilante justice is particularly bad for cyber attacks because attribution is particularly difficult.
Climate is weather averaged over time. For many systems, the average over time is much easier to work with than short-timescale behavior. Dice, for example.
It's a climate scientist dumbing statistics down for the International Business Times.
Instead of all this qualitative bullshitting and clear lack of understanding of statistics (500k data points?), you should have made a quantitative statistical argument. If you have a 30-year period and random variability (such that any year is equally likely to be the Nth hottest), what is the probability that a 12-year span contains the 5 hottest years?
You qualitatively make it sound like the probability is high. "That's just how random numbers work."
I figure it to be about 0.5%.
That means that it's very likely that it's not simply random variability.
Worse, it's pretty easy to pin an obvious or even not-so-obvious cyberattack on someone else. If vigilante "cyber justice" is acceptable, then an efficient way of performing your cyber attack is simply to attack a third-party target and make it look like your real target did it.
There's a reason vigilante justice isn't acceptable.
They didn't want the tweets or even the private messages. They wanted any personal information Twitter happened to have, such as real name, e-mail address, payment information, etc.
"Active" means requiring a particular effort. Passive would be, for example, running Wikileaks and having people simply upload things to you. Each individual thing uploaded to you gets there without any action on your part. Harvesting data from a Tor node that you're running or gathering files from P2P networks (or downloading a movie) is certainly active.
It is, however, impossible to get classified data from a Tor node or a P2P network without it first having been brought -- incorrectly -- into an unclassified domain. As such, you can't be held responsible for exposing the classified data. There may be other laws you are breaking by doing this, but exposing classified data isn't one of them.
Simple solution is to just start turning down the electricity output
The government can't really simply control the power plants in that fashion, and there are a lot of industries that produce lots of CO2 that aren't electricity generation. It's a simple but ineffective solution.
Ultimately, "customers" are going to have to pay for anything. It's just a matter of which customers.
It's certainly just a system for (it's intended) getting money spent on reducing CO2 emissions, since spending money on it is how it will get done. (Though some CO2 emissions reductions have a positive return, rather than simply being a cost.) Cap-and-trade is just an attempt to have the money spent efficiently.
My comment defining it as poisonous has to do with its recent definition as a pollutant to be regulated.
That would make sense, if only pollutants and poisons were the same thing.
It's a very minor greenhouse gas at the minute concentrations found in the atmosphere, of no import compared to the effects of the number one greenhouse gas on planet earth, which is of course water vapor.
CO2 is about 10% of the total greenhouse effect, very roughly. Human-produced CO2 is about a quarter of it, also roughly. The greenhouse effect is responsible for about 33 C of Earth's temperature. So human-produced CO2 is, roughly, 1 C of temperature, which is a fairly substantial perturbation.
That something is a small part of the whole does not mean that its ability to perturb the system is also small.
I've undoubtedly got arsenic, chromium, lead, and cyanide ions in my blood, too. Toxic substances have thresholds. Many substances necessary for life are toxic above a certain threshold.
This includes carbon dioxide, which is not only toxic (at a few percent concentration) but is the chemical trigger that indicates to humans that they are asphyxiating. This is why low-oxygen envrionments with low or normal CO2 levels pose a serious asphyxiation risk (for example, rooms filled with nitrogen gas).
Good thing you read down to bullet points 3 and 4.:P
Oxygen is toxic. To my knowledge, water is not really toxic, although too much water can certainly be a problem.
To be fair, whether something is a poison depends on what definition you're using. If Paracelsus says everything is a poison, it can't be too far off the mark.
How do you verify that a company that sells credits has really reduced their own carbon footprint by the requisite amount?
Same way you determine whether or not they're within the limits in an emissions-cap system, I suppose. Probably roughly the same way they're within environmental pollution regulations.
I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, but it's a problem shared by all systems for reducing emissions.
What a beautiful scam, declare a gas absolutely essential to life on the earth a poisonous taxable thing.
A few points: * CO2 is, in fact, poisonous (well, toxic). * CO2 emissions restrictions have nothing to do with whether CO2 is poisonous, since obviously it's not poisonous at atmospheric concentrations. * "Essential to life" and "poisonous" (toxic) are not mutually exclusive. Besides carbon dioxide, there's oxygen and quite a few metals, to say nothing of fancier things like fat-soluble vitamins. * "Essential to life" and "problematic in sufficiently large quantities" aren't mutually exclusive, either. Water comes to mind.
Carbon credits are part of cap-and-trade, in which CO2-producing industrial concerns have their CO2 production limited by law. Entities that are below their limit can essentially sell the difference between their limit and their actual CO2 emissions to other entities (who presumably would otherwise be above their limit).
If CO2 emissions were simply capped by law, industrial concerns would all have to make CO2 emissions reductions regardless of the cost-effectiveness of doing so. Adding the "and trade" component means that it becomes economically advantageous to make reductions wherever it is the most cost-effective. Since CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't care where it comes from, this means that CO2 emissions are reduced more for lower cost than with a cap-only system.
It was already downloadable software. It's roughly as inaccessible to the Iranian government as it was before, but now more accessible to Iranian non-government.
Slashdot Mirror
All they ask for in this statement is exactly what you said you have no problem with: a reverse mapping of (IP address, time) to customer and customer information (e.g., address).
The problem, they claim, is that ISPs only store this data for short periods of time, which is insufficient. They specifically mention that they are not requesting that ISPs start storing data that they do not already store.
And it will do nothing to catch criminals, because they can just pass all their data through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN provider in another country.
This argument isn't correct. You assume that every criminal will circumvent this measure. That ignores all the criminals who don't (obviously). Given that there are a ton of great ways out there already to avoid getting caught doing bad things on the Internet and lots of criminals don't bother with any of them, it seems likely that lots of criminals also won't bother circumventing ISP logs.
They need to forcibly enter your home or occupied vehicle (rather than just being on your property). Otherwise, Florida's castle doctrine does exactly that.
Clearly, you're not big on empiricism and qualitative reasoning.
The more you have, the better the conclusions.
How much more? How much better? It's very important to know how reliable your results are when you have a limited amount of data and how much additional reliability more data will buy you.
In the example I gave, for instance, even though you have "only" 30 data points, you can be 99.5% confident that your observation is not due to chance.
Naturally, although many cyber attacks right now are done through botnets or are made to look as if they were done by an anonymous, meaningless entity, rather than intentionally placing evidence that leads you to believe it's from a particular third party.
The short version is that vigilante justice is particularly bad for cyber attacks because attribution is particularly difficult.
Climate is weather averaged over time. For many systems, the average over time is much easier to work with than short-timescale behavior. Dice, for example.
I don't know about Texas, but in Florida, your legal right to shoot (or otherwise use lethal force) against anyone on your property is fairly broad.
It's a climate scientist dumbing statistics down for the International Business Times.
Instead of all this qualitative bullshitting and clear lack of understanding of statistics (500k data points?), you should have made a quantitative statistical argument. If you have a 30-year period and random variability (such that any year is equally likely to be the Nth hottest), what is the probability that a 12-year span contains the 5 hottest years?
You qualitatively make it sound like the probability is high. "That's just how random numbers work."
I figure it to be about 0.5%.
That means that it's very likely that it's not simply random variability.
Worse, it's pretty easy to pin an obvious or even not-so-obvious cyberattack on someone else. If vigilante "cyber justice" is acceptable, then an efficient way of performing your cyber attack is simply to attack a third-party target and make it look like your real target did it.
There's a reason vigilante justice isn't acceptable.
So, Wikileaks's stated goals and behaviors must be exactly what they're doing, right?
They didn't want the tweets or even the private messages. They wanted any personal information Twitter happened to have, such as real name, e-mail address, payment information, etc.
"Active" means requiring a particular effort. Passive would be, for example, running Wikileaks and having people simply upload things to you. Each individual thing uploaded to you gets there without any action on your part. Harvesting data from a Tor node that you're running or gathering files from P2P networks (or downloading a movie) is certainly active.
It is, however, impossible to get classified data from a Tor node or a P2P network without it first having been brought -- incorrectly -- into an unclassified domain. As such, you can't be held responsible for exposing the classified data. There may be other laws you are breaking by doing this, but exposing classified data isn't one of them.
Simple solution is to just start turning down the electricity output
The government can't really simply control the power plants in that fashion, and there are a lot of industries that produce lots of CO2 that aren't electricity generation. It's a simple but ineffective solution.
Ultimately, "customers" are going to have to pay for anything. It's just a matter of which customers.
It's certainly just a system for (it's intended) getting money spent on reducing CO2 emissions, since spending money on it is how it will get done. (Though some CO2 emissions reductions have a positive return, rather than simply being a cost.) Cap-and-trade is just an attempt to have the money spent efficiently.
My comment defining it as poisonous has to do with its recent definition as a pollutant to be regulated.
That would make sense, if only pollutants and poisons were the same thing.
It's a very minor greenhouse gas at the minute concentrations found in the atmosphere, of no import compared to the effects of the number one greenhouse gas on planet earth, which is of course water vapor.
CO2 is about 10% of the total greenhouse effect, very roughly. Human-produced CO2 is about a quarter of it, also roughly. The greenhouse effect is responsible for about 33 C of Earth's temperature. So human-produced CO2 is, roughly, 1 C of temperature, which is a fairly substantial perturbation.
That something is a small part of the whole does not mean that its ability to perturb the system is also small.
I've undoubtedly got arsenic, chromium, lead, and cyanide ions in my blood, too. Toxic substances have thresholds. Many substances necessary for life are toxic above a certain threshold.
This includes carbon dioxide, which is not only toxic (at a few percent concentration) but is the chemical trigger that indicates to humans that they are asphyxiating. This is why low-oxygen envrionments with low or normal CO2 levels pose a serious asphyxiation risk (for example, rooms filled with nitrogen gas).
* CO2 emissions restrictions have nothing to do with whether CO2 is poisonous, since obviously it's not poisonous at atmospheric concentrations.
Good thing you read down to bullet points 3 and 4. :P
Oxygen is toxic. To my knowledge, water is not really toxic, although too much water can certainly be a problem.
To be fair, whether something is a poison depends on what definition you're using. If Paracelsus says everything is a poison, it can't be too far off the mark.
The only way in which they are related is that both deal with carbon dioxide emissions.
Probably.
How do you verify that a company that sells credits has really reduced their own carbon footprint by the requisite amount?
Same way you determine whether or not they're within the limits in an emissions-cap system, I suppose. Probably roughly the same way they're within environmental pollution regulations.
I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, but it's a problem shared by all systems for reducing emissions.
What a beautiful scam, declare a gas absolutely essential to life on the earth a poisonous taxable thing.
A few points:
* CO2 is, in fact, poisonous (well, toxic).
* CO2 emissions restrictions have nothing to do with whether CO2 is poisonous, since obviously it's not poisonous at atmospheric concentrations.
* "Essential to life" and "poisonous" (toxic) are not mutually exclusive. Besides carbon dioxide, there's oxygen and quite a few metals, to say nothing of fancier things like fat-soluble vitamins.
* "Essential to life" and "problematic in sufficiently large quantities" aren't mutually exclusive, either. Water comes to mind.
Entirely different; that's a carbon offset.
Carbon credits are part of cap-and-trade, in which CO2-producing industrial concerns have their CO2 production limited by law. Entities that are below their limit can essentially sell the difference between their limit and their actual CO2 emissions to other entities (who presumably would otherwise be above their limit).
If CO2 emissions were simply capped by law, industrial concerns would all have to make CO2 emissions reductions regardless of the cost-effectiveness of doing so. Adding the "and trade" component means that it becomes economically advantageous to make reductions wherever it is the most cost-effective. Since CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't care where it comes from, this means that CO2 emissions are reduced more for lower cost than with a cap-only system.
It was already downloadable software. It's roughly as inaccessible to the Iranian government as it was before, but now more accessible to Iranian non-government.
As much as they were ever prevented from using the service before.