I can come to only one of two conclusions. Either the good guys knew about the attack in advance, and let it happen in order to avoid tipping their hands about their surveillance capabilities (in which case, what the fuck are they protecting us from?), or the good guys had the data but couldn't sort the wheat from the chaff (in which case, laws to further expand the dragnet of surveillance against the general population will reduce our security, not enhance it, by enlarging the haystack of data through which they're trying to search for the terorist needle.)
There's a third option also: The good guys had some of the evidence, but it was only obvious in hindsight since many more pieces were a) outside their reach and/or b) not conducted online.
In any event, expanding surveillance powers won't make us safer. Even if they aren't abused (and that IF is so big it can be seen from space), all they will do is toss more hay on the pile that the good guys are looking through to find the needle.
And just to forestall anyone replying to you with "lots of snow means no global warming": Warmer air means it can hold more moisture. This leads to more precipitation. Also, warmer weather means less lakes freeze over which means more lake effect snow. So a warming climate CAN lead to more snow despite the claims of certain politicians who claim that seeing snow outside proves global warming wrong.
Do you accelerate from every stop by pressing the gas pedal all the way to the floor or do you match how much gas you give it to the driving conditions and who and how many people are in your car?
Sadly, for too many drivers, the answer would be "I floor the gas, going from 0 to 60 in as short a time as possible. Then, I hit the brakes and come screeching to a halt at the red light four blocks ahead of me."
Weighing a person and weighing a fully loaded plane are two very different things. If you need the level of technology required to weight a plane when you're weighing a person, I doubt that person's going to fit into a standard hospital bed.
But can you really make that choice for your children and grandchildren, unto a dozen generations?
As a parent, I make a lot of choices for my kids. Some of these choices will shape the lives of my grandchildren. For example, I choose to live in the US right now. If I and my wife had decided to move to another country, our kids' lives would have been vastly different. I don't see "making that choice for your children and grandchildren" to be that huge. It's what parents do every day. You don't sit back and ask your baby where he'd like to grow up. You pick a place and that's where your child will live. If that place happened to be a generational ship, then the child will grow up knowing that as home.
Which made her death as the end of Episode 3 all the more frustrating. She's able to take on anything and everything, but her guy turned to the Dark Side? That's it, time to die. Never mind that she has children now or any other reason to live (even if it was to try to redeem him). Nope. Padme just says "Anakin's on the Dark Side so I'm dying now" and that's that. If she had to die, she deserved a much more meaningful death than that.
The only "kick ass" female I can even point to in SW is Leia... and yet she needs saving by a male regularly and is completely objectified for the better part of an entire movie.
In the first movie, she needs saving from the Death Star/Vader because she was actively working with the rebellion. During the rescue, however, she takes charge at various points to help herself get rescued (even sarcastically commenting on the "skill" of Luke/Han/Chewie in rescuing her). After that, she's not in the final battle, but she's helping coordinate the attack.
The last movie does have her in a demeaning "Slave Leia" outfit. However, I think that outfit being demeaning was the whole point. Jabba is a horrible, horrible person (well, Hutt). He's not a nice guy at all. He's willing to let one of his dancers get eaten on a whim/for laughs. Leia is captured by him, but this is all part of a plan to get everyone in the right position. When the time is right, Leia doesn't just wait for Luke to rescue her. Instead, she uses the very chains that Jabba put on her to "keep her in her place" to choke him to death. Then she escapes from Jabba's skiff with Luke. She's also instrumental in the final battle on Endor befriending the Ewoks who, hatred of Ewoks aside, do help in the end.
If you mixed up a bunch of homeopathy treatments you wouldn't be able to tell which is which because they're all water.
I read a quote once where a purveyor of homeopathic treatments said that science simply hasn't "caught up" enough to detect their treatments. Let's assume this is true for a second and that homeopathy actually works. How would we keep sellers of homeopathic remedies honest? How do we know that their "cure for disease A" isn't just tap water instead of the actual cure they claim it is? If a drug company replaced their pills with sugar pills, it would be easy to detect this and show they were committing fraud. However, the homeopathic peddler essentially admitted that there's no way to show he/she isn't committing fraud and we should just trust that the pills are what they claim to be.
So even if we assumed that homeopathy works (a HUGE if), it still wouldn't beat out regular medicine because there would be no protection against companies selling fraudulent homeopathic products.
One has a mechanism that is proven via science to work and the other is unproven hand-waving (and that's being generous - it's probably actually been proven to not work at all).
The flu vaccine takes bits of killed flu virus and puts them in your body. Your immune system sees these bits as invaders and mounts a defense. This way, when the real flu invades, your body knows how to fight it off. The rewards are protection against the flu. The risk is low because these bits of dead flu virus can't multiply and give you the flu. (Them being dead bits and all.) At worst, the flu virus constitutes a guessing game. We need to predict ahead of time which flu strains will be prevalent so we can put those bits in the vaccine. If we guess wrong, the vaccine won't protect us as well. At its core, though, the flu vaccine works the same as any other vaccine - which in general have drastically reduced the diseases they protect against.
As far as homeopathic medicine goes, the theory is that 1) like cures like and 2) water has memory. So if your illness involves you getting nauseous, you would find some other compound that makes people nauseous. You would mix that into some water and then dilute to the point that statistically there isn't even a molecule of the stuff left per dose. But "water has memory" so the cure not only works, but is stronger. Or so say the homeopaths... In reality, you can't cure illnesses by giving someone something that causes the same symptoms and water doesn't have any memory. It can hold compounds, but it won't magically retain a "memory" of those compounds if they aren't in the water anymore. Neither does any effect of a diluted compound increase the more it is diluted. If this were the case, all water on Earth would have a strong "dinosaur pee" taste (having been diluted for millions of years).
That stood out to me as well. If patients en masse decided "leeches help sure cancer" then should those be covered? Or should what is covered be based on medicines/treatments that are actually scientifically proven to actually TREAT what they are supposed to be used for?
The article definitely makes it sound like it was a mix up due to the two babies having similar names (Joanna Rivera vs. Joannie Rivera), having the same birthday, and being in the same general area.
After 25 years of confusion, the Social Security Administration reportedly has admitted its mistake at last: In 1990, two Florida hospitals created the same record for two babies with similar first names, the same last name and the same date of birth, and the administration gave them both the same Social Security number.
The article lists some red flags that should have been raised (two addresses listed as being active, the IRS getting W2 forms from two employers that weren't even near each other, etc). In my experience, though, companies and government agencies don't mind missing red flags. Red flags mean that someone has to put in extra effort to resolve the issue. Ignoring the red flag, though, means that you continue doing what you're doing and it becomes someone else's problem.
SSN started out merely as an identifying number to record social security payments. After awhile, though, it morphed into a number that identifies you for everything. However, this isn't a very secure number and it can be compromised in any of a dozen different ways. Combine this with a person's name and date of birth and you can do some horrible things to their credit rating while raking up huge debts in their name.
I know this first hand since I'm a victim of identity theft. Someone got hold of my name, address, DOB, and SSN (how, I'll never know). They opened a credit card in my name. (Despite, I might add, getting my mother's maiden name wildly wrong. So much for that "security question.") The only thing that kept this nightmare from being much, much worse was that they paid for rush delivery of the card and THEN changed the address on the card. The card was sent to me before the address change went through so I was able to shut the account down before any real damage was done. Of course, I still need to have my credit frozen for the rest of my life since my information's out there and could be used at any moment.
Fortunately, there have been enough identity theft stories in the news to make people aware of the situation. Unfortunately, too many companies require you to give your SSN when they don't really need it and too many people just assume "it's required so I have no choice."
Not only that, but that kind of logic also leads to prisoners becoming repeat offenders even if they try to go straight. A prisoner can get released after serving his time only to find out:
1) He has no money to afford rent, food, clothing, etc. 2) He can't live with relatives because of laws forbidding certain residents from allowing felons to live in their apartments. 3) Jobs pass him up immediately (not even giving him an interview) once he checks "Have you ever been convicted of a felony" on the application form. 4) Parole officers set odd times for him to check in - requiring him to choose between skipping out on a job he was lucky enough to get or skipping his parole hearing. 5) Even having a parole officer is an expense that he has to pay for.
All of this conspires to make it hard for someone released from prison (again, after having served their time) to live their life without committing more crimes. However, any attempt to make it easier for ex-convicts to live honest lives is painted as being soft on crime because "obviously" once-a-criminal-always-a-criminal.
(John Oliver recently had a great segment on this subject. It's on YouTube, but unfortunately I don't have the link here.)
The scrutiny is the point. Blanket surveillance is shit for finding actual criminal / terrorist activity because the false positive rate means that your agents will all be tied up investigating bad leads forever.
Exactly this. Finding "criminal/terrorist" activity can be a needle in a haystack endeavor at the best of times. However, mass surveillance just adds more hay to the stack under the notion that maybe perhaps you'll possibly be tossing in another needle or two. Of course, now you have to sift through 1,000 times the hay just to find one more needle.
Do they need to do surveillance? Sure. But it should be targeted and only undertaken after the proper warrants have been obtained. Is there the possibility that they won't pick up on some activity until it's too late? Yes, but the loss of liberty from mass surveillance isn't worth the tiny perceived increase in security that mass surveillance brings.
I didn't have a bad time back in my college dorms... once I got my own dorm room and didn't have to deal with roommates. That said, I wouldn't want to go back to dorm life. Once you're married with two kids and live in a house, dorm life tends to cease as a social option.
I wonder: If someone from outside the UK found and reported a backdoor used by the UK government, could a UK security firm repeat this report in any way (since it has now been disclosed)? Or would that get them in trouble too? Either way, could they tell colleagues outside of the UK "hey, want to see something interesting, look over there" (i.e. not saying where/what the backdoor is but pointing their colleagues in the right direction) without getting in trouble?
Ok, let's suppose you manage to kill a couple of well placed individuals before you're caught and sent to prison (if you even make it into custody/to trial alive and aren't given the death penalty). Do you think the entire program will simply crumble without those VIPs? There are plenty of power hungry folks waiting to take the place of the VIPs you take out. Some might be slightly better than the VIPs, some might be worse.
What's more, after you've killed the VIPs, those in power will spin the event as proving that these "enhanced security measures" are not only needed, but aren't enough and they need MORE power. Most of the public will see the event as "crazy guy shoots up important people," will nod in agreement, and will sit back as more of their rights get taken away. If anything, going on a shooting rampage will result in more invasive programs, not a government that turns back from them.
Don't worry. Comcast isn't capping your Internet. They don't have "caps", they have "data thresholds" that you get charged a high rate for passing. But since they don't call them caps, everything is cool, right?
It's not that the cable companies are implementing data caps without knowing that 4K is coming. They're implementing data caps BECAUSE OF 4K and other Internet video sources. Internet video is cutting into their cable TV profits so the cable companies are leveraging their ISP monopolies to try to squash it before it takes off anymore. Using a monopoly in one market to squash competition in another market is illegal, but don't hold your breath on the government stopping the cable companies.
Finely grained billing would be nice if it's fairly priced, but the cable companies' version of "fine grained billing" is: Everyone gets to pay a high base rate and then they pay high overage fees for going over a small capped amount.
Cable's hold on people is seriously cracked, but not broken and I say this as a cord cutter for the past 8 months. Cable companies still hold monopoly (or duopoly in some cases) control over wired, high-speed Internet access. They can and do use this to keep people from leaving cable TV for other services.
1) Bundle Pricing - Some cable companies price Internet Only packages so that they are more than Internet + TV. So if you only want Internet, you will likely take the Internet + TV bundle to save money. Then, even if you put the cable box in the closet and never plug it in, the cable company can count you as a subscriber in their quarterly counts. This makes cord cutting seems like less of a phenomenon than it really is.
2) Caps and Overage Fees. By setting a cap and then charging for use over said cap, cable companies are adding to the cost of streaming videos. Netflix might not cost you only $10 a month, now, but $10 + $20 in overage fees. Yes, this additional cost is coming from your cable company and not Netflix, but all the customer will care about is that using Internet Video services is costing as much as cable TV costs and thus (the cable company hopes) they will leave Internet Video for cable TV. Even if the customer doesn't leave, the cable company is now profiting off of Netflix's services. (The cable company claims of caps/overages being needed for network management have long since been disproved.)
So while the cable companies maintain their ISP monopolies, the hold of Cable TV won't completely break. The federal government needs to seriously investigate this abuse of monopoly.
So if you would need explicit permission to post links would this link be a copyright violation since Slashdot hasn't given me permission? And would Slashdot be inducing infringement by allowing me to infringe on their copyright (without giving me explicit permission)?
I hope you didn't e-mail them this. If hyperlinks become covered by copyright and only able to be linked to with the explicit consent of the site owner, then how long until e-mails are copyrighted and you can only type THEM out with the permission of the e-mail owner? (Yes, this sound like it'd reduce spam, but do you really think spammers are going to care about copyright law?)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a third option also: The good guys had some of the evidence, but it was only obvious in hindsight since many more pieces were a) outside their reach and/or b) not conducted online.
In any event, expanding surveillance powers won't make us safer. Even if they aren't abused (and that IF is so big it can be seen from space), all they will do is toss more hay on the pile that the good guys are looking through to find the needle.
And just to forestall anyone replying to you with "lots of snow means no global warming": Warmer air means it can hold more moisture. This leads to more precipitation. Also, warmer weather means less lakes freeze over which means more lake effect snow. So a warming climate CAN lead to more snow despite the claims of certain politicians who claim that seeing snow outside proves global warming wrong.
Sadly, for too many drivers, the answer would be "I floor the gas, going from 0 to 60 in as short a time as possible. Then, I hit the brakes and come screeching to a halt at the red light four blocks ahead of me."
Weighing a person and weighing a fully loaded plane are two very different things. If you need the level of technology required to weight a plane when you're weighing a person, I doubt that person's going to fit into a standard hospital bed.
As a parent, I make a lot of choices for my kids. Some of these choices will shape the lives of my grandchildren. For example, I choose to live in the US right now. If I and my wife had decided to move to another country, our kids' lives would have been vastly different. I don't see "making that choice for your children and grandchildren" to be that huge. It's what parents do every day. You don't sit back and ask your baby where he'd like to grow up. You pick a place and that's where your child will live. If that place happened to be a generational ship, then the child will grow up knowing that as home.
GOTO Comment(50924379)
And now anyone reading the comments from the top down will be caught in an infinite loop! *insert evil laugh here*
Which made her death as the end of Episode 3 all the more frustrating. She's able to take on anything and everything, but her guy turned to the Dark Side? That's it, time to die. Never mind that she has children now or any other reason to live (even if it was to try to redeem him). Nope. Padme just says "Anakin's on the Dark Side so I'm dying now" and that's that. If she had to die, she deserved a much more meaningful death than that.
In the first movie, she needs saving from the Death Star/Vader because she was actively working with the rebellion. During the rescue, however, she takes charge at various points to help herself get rescued (even sarcastically commenting on the "skill" of Luke/Han/Chewie in rescuing her). After that, she's not in the final battle, but she's helping coordinate the attack.
The last movie does have her in a demeaning "Slave Leia" outfit. However, I think that outfit being demeaning was the whole point. Jabba is a horrible, horrible person (well, Hutt). He's not a nice guy at all. He's willing to let one of his dancers get eaten on a whim/for laughs. Leia is captured by him, but this is all part of a plan to get everyone in the right position. When the time is right, Leia doesn't just wait for Luke to rescue her. Instead, she uses the very chains that Jabba put on her to "keep her in her place" to choke him to death. Then she escapes from Jabba's skiff with Luke. She's also instrumental in the final battle on Endor befriending the Ewoks who, hatred of Ewoks aside, do help in the end.
I read a quote once where a purveyor of homeopathic treatments said that science simply hasn't "caught up" enough to detect their treatments. Let's assume this is true for a second and that homeopathy actually works. How would we keep sellers of homeopathic remedies honest? How do we know that their "cure for disease A" isn't just tap water instead of the actual cure they claim it is? If a drug company replaced their pills with sugar pills, it would be easy to detect this and show they were committing fraud. However, the homeopathic peddler essentially admitted that there's no way to show he/she isn't committing fraud and we should just trust that the pills are what they claim to be.
So even if we assumed that homeopathy works (a HUGE if), it still wouldn't beat out regular medicine because there would be no protection against companies selling fraudulent homeopathic products.
One has a mechanism that is proven via science to work and the other is unproven hand-waving (and that's being generous - it's probably actually been proven to not work at all).
The flu vaccine takes bits of killed flu virus and puts them in your body. Your immune system sees these bits as invaders and mounts a defense. This way, when the real flu invades, your body knows how to fight it off. The rewards are protection against the flu. The risk is low because these bits of dead flu virus can't multiply and give you the flu. (Them being dead bits and all.) At worst, the flu virus constitutes a guessing game. We need to predict ahead of time which flu strains will be prevalent so we can put those bits in the vaccine. If we guess wrong, the vaccine won't protect us as well. At its core, though, the flu vaccine works the same as any other vaccine - which in general have drastically reduced the diseases they protect against.
As far as homeopathic medicine goes, the theory is that 1) like cures like and 2) water has memory. So if your illness involves you getting nauseous, you would find some other compound that makes people nauseous. You would mix that into some water and then dilute to the point that statistically there isn't even a molecule of the stuff left per dose. But "water has memory" so the cure not only works, but is stronger. Or so say the homeopaths... In reality, you can't cure illnesses by giving someone something that causes the same symptoms and water doesn't have any memory. It can hold compounds, but it won't magically retain a "memory" of those compounds if they aren't in the water anymore. Neither does any effect of a diluted compound increase the more it is diluted. If this were the case, all water on Earth would have a strong "dinosaur pee" taste (having been diluted for millions of years).
That stood out to me as well. If patients en masse decided "leeches help sure cancer" then should those be covered? Or should what is covered be based on medicines/treatments that are actually scientifically proven to actually TREAT what they are supposed to be used for?
If the reward is the same as just giving the user a does-nothing sugar pill, then it can be said to be the same as zero.
The article definitely makes it sound like it was a mix up due to the two babies having similar names (Joanna Rivera vs. Joannie Rivera), having the same birthday, and being in the same general area.
The article lists some red flags that should have been raised (two addresses listed as being active, the IRS getting W2 forms from two employers that weren't even near each other, etc). In my experience, though, companies and government agencies don't mind missing red flags. Red flags mean that someone has to put in extra effort to resolve the issue. Ignoring the red flag, though, means that you continue doing what you're doing and it becomes someone else's problem.
SSN started out merely as an identifying number to record social security payments. After awhile, though, it morphed into a number that identifies you for everything. However, this isn't a very secure number and it can be compromised in any of a dozen different ways. Combine this with a person's name and date of birth and you can do some horrible things to their credit rating while raking up huge debts in their name.
I know this first hand since I'm a victim of identity theft. Someone got hold of my name, address, DOB, and SSN (how, I'll never know). They opened a credit card in my name. (Despite, I might add, getting my mother's maiden name wildly wrong. So much for that "security question.") The only thing that kept this nightmare from being much, much worse was that they paid for rush delivery of the card and THEN changed the address on the card. The card was sent to me before the address change went through so I was able to shut the account down before any real damage was done. Of course, I still need to have my credit frozen for the rest of my life since my information's out there and could be used at any moment.
Fortunately, there have been enough identity theft stories in the news to make people aware of the situation. Unfortunately, too many companies require you to give your SSN when they don't really need it and too many people just assume "it's required so I have no choice."
Not only that, but that kind of logic also leads to prisoners becoming repeat offenders even if they try to go straight. A prisoner can get released after serving his time only to find out:
1) He has no money to afford rent, food, clothing, etc.
2) He can't live with relatives because of laws forbidding certain residents from allowing felons to live in their apartments.
3) Jobs pass him up immediately (not even giving him an interview) once he checks "Have you ever been convicted of a felony" on the application form.
4) Parole officers set odd times for him to check in - requiring him to choose between skipping out on a job he was lucky enough to get or skipping his parole hearing.
5) Even having a parole officer is an expense that he has to pay for.
All of this conspires to make it hard for someone released from prison (again, after having served their time) to live their life without committing more crimes. However, any attempt to make it easier for ex-convicts to live honest lives is painted as being soft on crime because "obviously" once-a-criminal-always-a-criminal.
(John Oliver recently had a great segment on this subject. It's on YouTube, but unfortunately I don't have the link here.)
Exactly this. Finding "criminal/terrorist" activity can be a needle in a haystack endeavor at the best of times. However, mass surveillance just adds more hay to the stack under the notion that maybe perhaps you'll possibly be tossing in another needle or two. Of course, now you have to sift through 1,000 times the hay just to find one more needle.
Do they need to do surveillance? Sure. But it should be targeted and only undertaken after the proper warrants have been obtained. Is there the possibility that they won't pick up on some activity until it's too late? Yes, but the loss of liberty from mass surveillance isn't worth the tiny perceived increase in security that mass surveillance brings.
I didn't have a bad time back in my college dorms... once I got my own dorm room and didn't have to deal with roommates. That said, I wouldn't want to go back to dorm life. Once you're married with two kids and live in a house, dorm life tends to cease as a social option.
I wonder: If someone from outside the UK found and reported a backdoor used by the UK government, could a UK security firm repeat this report in any way (since it has now been disclosed)? Or would that get them in trouble too? Either way, could they tell colleagues outside of the UK "hey, want to see something interesting, look over there" (i.e. not saying where/what the backdoor is but pointing their colleagues in the right direction) without getting in trouble?
Ok, let's suppose you manage to kill a couple of well placed individuals before you're caught and sent to prison (if you even make it into custody/to trial alive and aren't given the death penalty). Do you think the entire program will simply crumble without those VIPs? There are plenty of power hungry folks waiting to take the place of the VIPs you take out. Some might be slightly better than the VIPs, some might be worse.
What's more, after you've killed the VIPs, those in power will spin the event as proving that these "enhanced security measures" are not only needed, but aren't enough and they need MORE power. Most of the public will see the event as "crazy guy shoots up important people," will nod in agreement, and will sit back as more of their rights get taken away. If anything, going on a shooting rampage will result in more invasive programs, not a government that turns back from them.
Don't worry. Comcast isn't capping your Internet. They don't have "caps", they have "data thresholds" that you get charged a high rate for passing. But since they don't call them caps, everything is cool, right?
It's not that the cable companies are implementing data caps without knowing that 4K is coming. They're implementing data caps BECAUSE OF 4K and other Internet video sources. Internet video is cutting into their cable TV profits so the cable companies are leveraging their ISP monopolies to try to squash it before it takes off anymore. Using a monopoly in one market to squash competition in another market is illegal, but don't hold your breath on the government stopping the cable companies.
Finely grained billing would be nice if it's fairly priced, but the cable companies' version of "fine grained billing" is: Everyone gets to pay a high base rate and then they pay high overage fees for going over a small capped amount.
Cable's hold on people is seriously cracked, but not broken and I say this as a cord cutter for the past 8 months. Cable companies still hold monopoly (or duopoly in some cases) control over wired, high-speed Internet access. They can and do use this to keep people from leaving cable TV for other services.
1) Bundle Pricing - Some cable companies price Internet Only packages so that they are more than Internet + TV. So if you only want Internet, you will likely take the Internet + TV bundle to save money. Then, even if you put the cable box in the closet and never plug it in, the cable company can count you as a subscriber in their quarterly counts. This makes cord cutting seems like less of a phenomenon than it really is.
2) Caps and Overage Fees. By setting a cap and then charging for use over said cap, cable companies are adding to the cost of streaming videos. Netflix might not cost you only $10 a month, now, but $10 + $20 in overage fees. Yes, this additional cost is coming from your cable company and not Netflix, but all the customer will care about is that using Internet Video services is costing as much as cable TV costs and thus (the cable company hopes) they will leave Internet Video for cable TV. Even if the customer doesn't leave, the cable company is now profiting off of Netflix's services. (The cable company claims of caps/overages being needed for network management have long since been disproved.)
So while the cable companies maintain their ISP monopolies, the hold of Cable TV won't completely break. The federal government needs to seriously investigate this abuse of monopoly.
So if you would need explicit permission to post links would this link be a copyright violation since Slashdot hasn't given me permission? And would Slashdot be inducing infringement by allowing me to infringe on their copyright (without giving me explicit permission)?
I hope you didn't e-mail them this. If hyperlinks become covered by copyright and only able to be linked to with the explicit consent of the site owner, then how long until e-mails are copyrighted and you can only type THEM out with the permission of the e-mail owner? (Yes, this sound like it'd reduce spam, but do you really think spammers are going to care about copyright law?)