Unless benb has information absent from the policy
(perfectly possible, as I gather he was in on its creation), I don't
see how he can state:
> No, mozilla.org won't disclose it
until half a year later.
In the declaration's early section labelled
General Policies, we find:
As noted above, information about security bugs can be
held confidential for some period of time;
there is no
pre-determined
limit on how long that time period might be. However this is offset by
the fact that the person reporting a bug has visibility into the
activities (if any) being taken to address the bug, and has the power
to open the bug report for public scrutiny.
[Emphasis added]
And toward to the end, in the section Disclosure of security
vulnerabilities:
Please try not to keep bugs in the security-sensitive
category for an unreasonably long amount of time.
Thus, unless the discoverer is a member of the security group, the
original submitter's right to uncloak the report says to me there's no
way a bug could be stifled for six months, and further, they're asking
that it not be.
My dilettante's knowledge of black holes says nothing comes out except some radiation whose name I forget, but which is generated by the simple expedient of having a pair of virtual particles generated near the event horizon, and one falls in while the other doesn't. Since the two can't then recombine to disappear, we get a spontaneously-generated random particle.
(This is why one commentator maintains that causality fails near the event horizon. You could just as well get a desk [or a sperm whale] show up as some alpha particles. Of course, this is very roughly of the same probability as all the air molecules in your cube all moving to the left half for a second, leaving you in a vacuum. I wouldn't worry about it myself.)
Anyway, since photons don't get out of a black hole, how is the alleged magnetism applied from within the dingus? Do space-time geodesics extend across the event horizon? (You know, all those neat graph lines in the diagrams showing how gravity warps space.) Does the spinning hole then drag them around, making it all work?
I'd appreciate it if Carl Sagan's successor would speak up on this subject; thanks.
What!?? No C7H8N4O2?!! What's the world coming to?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 1
And worse, in 600-odd (some of them very odd) comments, no one's yet added it. We're talking theobromine (translated ``food of the gods'', roughly)---the major active ingredient in CHOCOLATE!
Erm, sorry for shouting; I haven't had my daily quarter-pound of dark yet.
From Chocolate, The Consuming Passion, by Sandra Boynton:
This book is dedicated to those thousands of people who like chocolate, using like as in the sentence ``I like to breathe.''
I'm not up on the energy costs of various hydrogen compounds,
but if you're carrying it as water, which I presume is to be the
exhaust gas, you're postulating a perpetual-motion machine.
(I.e., getting net positive energy from the process H2O ->
H2 + O followed by H2 + O -> H2O. Separating hydrogen from
some other substance may cost less than from water, but it
still sounds bogus.
Further, how much energy do you get from hydrogen combustion,
and based on that, what weight H2 is needed to supply the
equivalent of one plane's-worth of aviation fuel? What volume
would that amount take, under what conditions?
Any chem. types out there with answers? All I've got are
questions.:-/
As it happens, I'm running Mozilla 0.9.2 on WinNT (yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what the company supplies me with). I may have told it to lie a wee bit about its, and my, identity, but is that any reason to cut me off from seeing those ads the customers are paying them to run?
Look at the record. How much of software innovation was pre-, say, -1985? Wasn't it pitiful how no one invented assembly language, compilers, recursion, graphics routines, &c., &c., until such ideas were protected not just by copyright, but by patent? Didn't it suppress the inventiveness of thousands of programmers, until they felt free, knowing they could finally receive just compensation for their skull-sweat?
Of course it did! Just plot the number of software patents against a timeline, and look at that exponential curve! The graph shows that once things were patentable, ideas sprang up on every keyboard, and have been coming up faster and faster ever since.
[I've never used Napster, so apply the appropriate amount of salt.]
Assuming anyone gives enough of a damn, how could Napster effectively enforce this? If online-game cheaters can reverse engineer the protocol, despite the best efforts of the games' originators, how is the Napster protocol any different?
The worst that might be called for would be to download the officially-blessed code, root around in it for the key to its digital signature, or perhaps send a hash of a bit of the original binary, and mimic it in your favorite flavor of deprecated client. Napster can't win, they can only get momentary advantages.
I can see how many would consider this more effort than it's worth, but there must be a number of hackers for whom this is just an interesting challenge.
The two comments above point up an important priciple. Any system needs some play in it: make the tolerances too tight, and everything pretty much grinds to a halt.
You can see it at work in everything from the ``war'' on drugs, through the Business Software Alliance, to vending machines. Try to prevent every single infraction, and you end up with variously a police state, incentive to use Free Software, or a candy machine with dismal sales because it rejects too many authentic-but-worn dollar bills.
That was Stephen King's mistake: trying to enforce a level of ethics on the 'net readership. If he'd simply contented himself with specifying how much cash he was looking for, and not worried about how many people were freeloading, both he and his readers wourld have been better off.
Any airtight e-security system will be too cumbersome to work without government force behind it (read: DMCA). Writers and artists will need to set their own level of tolerance for non-payment, and be happy so long as the rest supply enough cash to keep them happy.
Mr. Perens is working with HP to advance Free Software. Since HP is not part of the 4C Entity, it may be easier to get him onto T13.
Sorry about the mis-statement.
It's time to underwrite T13 members
on
CPRM Smokescreen
·
· Score: 1
Mr. Gilmore suggests we join T13 as voting members, to protect our interests. This sounds great, but here it says that you've got to attend two meetings (held mostly in California and Colorado, with a few other venues thrown in), at least. It may also require USD800 (it's not clear to me that you must be a member of ITI to join T13).
In any case, it's not like joining, say, ICANN, to be done from the comfort of your keyboard.
So, I suspect we're not all going to run out and do it. But, we can support some folks we trust to do so. My first thoughts are to ask Mr. Gilmore and/or Bruce Perens, if IBM's left hand would let its right oppose these doings. Noise won't help here, but a combine in the form of that supporting Damian Conway's Perl work should be possible. Can one of our existing organizations (YAS or SPI [if there's still anyone home at at the latter]) pick up the banking effort?
For myself, I pledge to donate USD100 to such an organization for this purpose. Are there seven others willing to step up to the plate? If so, we've got a membership in hand.
As it happens, I once worked for a company that asked for an invention-assignment agreement I didn't care for, but they just gave it to me in the pile of paperwork you get your first day: insurance forms, next-of-kin, whatnot---``Just fill these out and return them in the next few days.''
Well, somehow, that one didn't make it back to HR. Nothing said about it until about four years (!) later when an audit of employee files turned up the fact they had no signed agreement in mine. They just sent along a copy and asked for me to sign and return it. I ignored it, too, and heard nothing more in the two years I continued work there before changing jobs.
Of course, YMMV.:-), but I'm under the impression that most HR offices are no more clueful than they were.
I can loan it to someone, or flat out resell it (although the latter is arguably legal).
The latter is absolutely legal: it's called the First-Sale Doctrine, and means that once the copyright-holder has sold the copy (hence, the ``first sale''), the purchaser can do anything she pleases with it, except copy it (hence, ``copyright'':-). This article talks about it in an amusing sidelight, but includes an excellent point:
The Supreme Court, at least, has not forgotten that copyright is a bargain---that the copyright owner takes away some exclusive rights, but those rights are limited by and subservient to other rights held by the owners of copies of protected works and by the public at large.
Sell it, burn it, fly it from a flagpole, it's yours now.
Yeah, it is cool, but you're a couple decades too late:-). Colin Fletcher, while revising The Complete Walker for what would become The Complete Walker III, writes in the intro (IIRC) that he tried to sell his publisher on calling it The Pre-antepenultimate
Complete Walker. I'm still waiting for the antepenultimate edition.
My druggist just added a web site for ordering refills. I was leery of it until I visited---all they ask for is your name and prescription number, which is then *faxed* to them. The prescription info is not in an Internet-connected system. They use HTTPS for the entry, which is nice, but even better is the fact that any evesdropper will have exactly zero useful info. To know what's going on would require social engineering or a breakin to either the drugstore or my home, at which point any computer involvement is moot.
So, examine your transactions carefully---you can increase security with good choices of what data to expose.
Oh, yeah, and build in checks, as has been pointed out elsewhere. The first time I used their new system, I entered a typo. Within minutes a pharmacist was on the line verifying what I really wanted.
only use computers which run the software to actually ship the mail across the net (a Mail Transfer Agent, or MTA, and hint: the web browser that lets you access your e-mail ain't one), and
keep those computers connected to the net 24x7 so your two MTAs can talk directly to each other whenever they wish, and
happen to avoid sending traffic through any system (your ISP's, their backbone provider's, or any random router somewhere) on which the sysop is examining traffic for tuning, debugging, or pure enjoyment,
there's gonna be lotsa folks who can read your e-mails.
And don't forget any system on which the mail resides momentarily while a backup is in progress (limited by point 1, above, to the two endpoints, but if you slip up...). That means there's a copy of said mail stashed more-or-less permanently on some mag. tape in some unknown person's hands.
There's really a lot to be said for paper. If you insist on digitizing your practice, then don't let any of your systems connect to the Internet, directly or indirectly. (''Oh, we'll just send this to Dr. Kildare, on a floppy---that's safe, right?'' Yeah, until someone breaks into his system.)
I would say that this is likely to be well beyond the capabilities of most script kiddies
I thought the definition of script kiddie was ``someone whose capacity doesn't come close to encompassing X, for all values of X != `run predigested code.' ''
Thus, unless ``changing the configuration of the drivers'' is something hairy enough that no scriptmaster will bother doing it, it's only a matter of time before the kiddies are equipped.
I first heard about the Stockholm situation (which I'm certain is no different from that of NYC, London, Paris (if you read French:-), &c.) from this copy of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-gram newsletter. It's near the bottom---search for ``anecdote''.
Makes me wish I had a WaveLAN...
Re:So we harrass innocents for the greater good?
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
The underlying argument that you (and others on the racial profiling bandwagon) seem to be on is that the police really are "harassing" blacks completely based on their race and not as part of an ongoing police investigation.
Now that's an interesting attempt to twist the facts to support an argument.
The trouble with the attempt is that we're not ``on the... bandwagon'', but simply reacting to events.
Take a f'rinstance my beautiful Northern state of Connecticut. A couple of blacks were seen driving an expensive sports car out of a beach parking lot in one of the more well-off areas of the state (Sherwood Island, for those of you who know the area). The cops stopped them, for no justifiable reason, on ``suspicion'' of auto theft. Luckily for the driver, and unluckily for the cops, the driver was an Army general, and his buddy was an Assistant Attorney General for the state. As you can imagine the problem was settled quickly and quietly; I only know about it because one of my friends is a specialist in, shall we say, police-misbehavior cases hereabouts. Sorry I can't give you any independent verification for this one.
These are just the cases of people with enough clout to raise a proper stink over their unjustified treatment. If you've ever tried to fight City Hall, you know how hard it is for a regular Joe to get a hearing, much less someone from the poor section of town. Nevertheless, when police records are examined (in the cases where they keep good enough records to tell) the evidence is clear---police stop blacks for no reason much more than others.
What the left really doesn't want, in the name of racial equality or whatever the mission is, is common sense to be applied to policing.
Well, certainly not, if that ``common sense'' means stopping innocent citizens with no suspicion of their having done anything wrong. And, yes we do posit an alternative---follow the Constitution, stop those who against whom you have some evidence, and let the rest of the citizenry enjoy the rights for which we fought to establish this country.
So we harrass innocents for the greater good?
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
I hardly know where to start with this one.
Let's grant the DOJ statistics your link points to. (If this were a real discussion, I'd ask whether the stats had been corrected for the innocents convicted because they were only black -----s, and hey, we've closed a case, right? I won't even ask how one defines so amorphous a concept as `race'. In my experience, it's always been ``someone who doesn't match my wonderful genetic makeup''---witness the fact that in the U.S., someone with seven ``white'' great-grandparents and one ``black'' one counts as ``black''. How does that scan in any sane classification system?) Let's even be generous and say the stats are up to 100 ``black'' murderers per 100,000, vs. 5 ``white''s.
So, how do you justify the completely unwarranted harrassment of 99,900 citizens to find 100 murderers? This country was founded on the belief that you're golden until you actually do something wrong, not until someone thinks you're more likely to do something wrong. This is the concept of ``probable cause'' referred to by the Fourth Amendment (in exactly those words). Probable cause is not a statistical concept. Either you've got reason to think this exact person committed that specified crime, or you have no probable cause. By no stretch of the imagination can being ``black'' be probable cause, therefore it is totally unjustifiable to claim you're just checking ``people who commit serious crimes nearly 8 times more than the rest of the population''. Either this particular person (not one of some random people you spot) actually committed a crime, and you have a good reason to think that's the case, or you keep your mitts off.
The trouble today (and in all previous days, for that matter) is that people forget the probable cause, and think police should simply nail all criminals, blithely assuming there's a 100%-valid mechanism for identifying them, and the police have it. That's why most folks today assume anyone arrested is guilty, why it's so insanely painful to be falsely accused, and why it's so dangerous to slack off in watching our public servants.
And when the police are given vastly more efficient methods to harrass everyone, we're in vastly greater danger.
Switching black holes ON and OFF?! This must be some totally-new observation implying a massive change in our UNDERSTANDING of the laws of physics!
Well, no...they're really talking of switching it the same way you'd switch a cliff's lemming consumption off and on, by either fencing the creatures away from the cliff, or herding them toward it. Big deal---compared to the speculation engendered by the headline.
That said, it's still interesting on its own terms: a supernova can first blow massive amounts of matter toward the black hole, supplying it with above-average input. Then, after the shockwave has passed the hole, it drives matter away (by the same mechanism, pushing it ahead of the shock), lowering the amount available for the hole to suck in.
If you can't prove an image is a fake, you can't prove that an image is genuine either.
Sure you can, but to do so requires a chain of custody from production to courtroom.
This affects all evidence these days. It used to be that you could (mostly) take a photo as evidence that the scene depicted was real, though it would be nice if you had someone to either say ``Yes, I was there, and it looked that way'', or have an expert testify that the photo wasn't tampered with. Now, you need the photographer to testify that she took the photo, and everyone else who had access to the negative (if available) or print to testify that it is unaltered, otherwise you can't assume it's a reflection of reality.
That's the sort of thing the OJ jury saw as introducing a reasonable doubt: the various items of evidence had suspect chains of custody; it was all too possible for someone to have tampered with them. The deal with computerized photo-alterations is simply that they raise the chain-of-custody requirements for photographs to a level not previously needed.
Thus, it's still possible to convict, just harder, because the photo is no longer irrefutable evidence of the event depicted.
And that, boys and girls, is why the cops must bag and label the evidence, keep it under supervised lock and key, and be able to testify that it's unaltered in court---without that it's too easy to convict someone who's the victim of a vendetta. Of course, that's still possible if the vendetta is prosecuted by the cops....
Slashdot Mirror
> No, mozilla.org won't disclose it until half a year later.
In the declaration's early section labelled General Policies , we find:
And toward to the end, in the section Disclosure of security vulnerabilities : Thus, unless the discoverer is a member of the security group, the original submitter's right to uncloak the report says to me there's no way a bug could be stifled for six months, and further, they're asking that it not be.YMMV, of course.
My dilettante's knowledge of black holes says nothing comes out except some radiation whose name I forget, but which is generated by the simple expedient of having a pair of virtual particles generated near the event horizon, and one falls in while the other doesn't. Since the two can't then recombine to disappear, we get a spontaneously-generated random particle.
(This is why one commentator maintains that causality fails near the event horizon. You could just as well get a desk [or a sperm whale] show up as some alpha particles. Of course, this is very roughly of the same probability as all the air molecules in your cube all moving to the left half for a second, leaving you in a vacuum. I wouldn't worry about it myself.)
Anyway, since photons don't get out of a black hole, how is the alleged magnetism applied from within the dingus? Do space-time geodesics extend across the event horizon? (You know, all those neat graph lines in the diagrams showing how gravity warps space.) Does the spinning hole then drag them around, making it all work?
I'd appreciate it if Carl Sagan's successor would speak up on this subject; thanks.
And worse, in 600-odd (some of them very odd) comments, no one's yet added it. We're talking theobromine (translated ``food of the gods'', roughly)---the major active ingredient in CHOCOLATE!
Erm, sorry for shouting; I haven't had my daily quarter-pound of dark yet.
From Chocolate, The Consuming Passion, by Sandra Boynton:
...or something like that...
I'm not up on the energy costs of various hydrogen compounds, but if you're carrying it as water, which I presume is to be the exhaust gas, you're postulating a perpetual-motion machine. (I.e., getting net positive energy from the process H2O -> H2 + O followed by H2 + O -> H2O. Separating hydrogen from some other substance may cost less than from water, but it still sounds bogus.
Further, how much energy do you get from hydrogen combustion, and based on that, what weight H2 is needed to supply the equivalent of one plane's-worth of aviation fuel? What volume would that amount take, under what conditions?
Any chem. types out there with answers? All I've got are questions. :-/
Thought I'd take a look at the story. Clicked on the link, ended up at their:
page.
As it happens, I'm running Mozilla 0.9.2 on WinNT (yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what the company supplies me with). I may have told it to lie a wee bit about its, and my, identity, but is that any reason to cut me off from seeing those ads the customers are paying them to run?
...I clean forgot to put in the <sarcasm> and </sarcasm> tags! Ya can't be too careful these days.
Look at the record. How much of software innovation was pre-, say, -1985? Wasn't it pitiful how no one invented assembly language, compilers, recursion, graphics routines, &c., &c., until such ideas were protected not just by copyright, but by patent? Didn't it suppress the inventiveness of thousands of programmers, until they felt free, knowing they could finally receive just compensation for their skull-sweat?
Of course it did! Just plot the number of software patents against a timeline, and look at that exponential curve! The graph shows that once things were patentable, ideas sprang up on every keyboard, and have been coming up faster and faster ever since.
<sigh> And programming used to be so much fun...
[I've never used Napster, so apply the appropriate amount of salt.]
Assuming anyone gives enough of a damn, how could Napster effectively enforce this? If online-game cheaters can reverse engineer the protocol, despite the best efforts of the games' originators, how is the Napster protocol any different?
The worst that might be called for would be to download the officially-blessed code, root around in it for the key to its digital signature, or perhaps send a hash of a bit of the original binary, and mimic it in your favorite flavor of deprecated client. Napster can't win, they can only get momentary advantages.
I can see how many would consider this more effort than it's worth, but there must be a number of hackers for whom this is just an interesting challenge.
(Yeah, it's stupid, but that was my first impression of the abbreviation when I saw the headline.)
...that's known for its (literal) raids on suspect businesses. Hey, I can only be right 99.44% of the time.
You can see it at work in everything from the ``war'' on drugs, through the Business Software Alliance, to vending machines. Try to prevent every single infraction, and you end up with variously a police state, incentive to use Free Software, or a candy machine with dismal sales because it rejects too many authentic-but-worn dollar bills.
That was Stephen King's mistake: trying to enforce a level of ethics on the 'net readership. If he'd simply contented himself with specifying how much cash he was looking for, and not worried about how many people were freeloading, both he and his readers wourld have been better off.
Any airtight e-security system will be too cumbersome to work without government force behind it (read: DMCA). Writers and artists will need to set their own level of tolerance for non-payment, and be happy so long as the rest supply enough cash to keep them happy.
'Cause it warns you when you're following a link to a brain-dead MS system. :-)
Sorry about the mis-statement.
In any case, it's not like joining, say, ICANN, to be done from the comfort of your keyboard.
So, I suspect we're not all going to run out and do it. But, we can support some folks we trust to do so. My first thoughts are to ask Mr. Gilmore and/or Bruce Perens, if IBM's left hand would let its right oppose these doings. Noise won't help here, but a combine in the form of that supporting Damian Conway's Perl work should be possible. Can one of our existing organizations (YAS or SPI [if there's still anyone home at at the latter]) pick up the banking effort?
For myself, I pledge to donate USD100 to such an organization for this purpose. Are there seven others willing to step up to the plate? If so, we've got a membership in hand.
As it happens, I once worked for a company that asked for an invention-assignment agreement I didn't care for, but they just gave it to me in the pile of paperwork you get your first day: insurance forms, next-of-kin, whatnot---``Just fill these out and return them in the next few days.''
Well, somehow, that one didn't make it back to HR. Nothing said about it until about four years (!) later when an audit of employee files turned up the fact they had no signed agreement in mine. They just sent along a copy and asked for me to sign and return it. I ignored it, too, and heard nothing more in the two years I continued work there before changing jobs.
Of course, YMMV. :-), but I'm under the impression that most HR offices are no more clueful than they were.
The latter is absolutely legal: it's called the First-Sale Doctrine, and means that once the copyright-holder has sold the copy (hence, the ``first sale''), the purchaser can do anything she pleases with it, except copy it (hence, ``copyright'' :-). This article talks about it in an amusing sidelight, but includes an excellent point:
Sell it, burn it, fly it from a flagpole, it's yours now.
Yeah, it is cool, but you're a couple decades too late :-). Colin Fletcher, while revising The Complete Walker for what would become The Complete Walker III, writes in the intro (IIRC) that he tried to sell his publisher on calling it The Pre-antepenultimate
Complete Walker. I'm still waiting for the antepenultimate edition.
...in deciding what and how to computerize.
My druggist just added a web site for ordering refills. I was leery of it until I visited---all they ask for is your name and prescription number, which is then *faxed* to them. The prescription info is not in an Internet-connected system. They use HTTPS for the entry, which is nice, but even better is the fact that any evesdropper will have exactly zero useful info. To know what's going on would require social engineering or a breakin to either the drugstore or my home, at which point any computer involvement is moot.
So, examine your transactions carefully---you can increase security with good choices of what data to expose.
Oh, yeah, and build in checks, as has been pointed out elsewhere. The first time I used their new system, I entered a typo. Within minutes a pharmacist was on the line verifying what I really wanted.
Unless you and your patient
- only use computers which run the software to actually ship the mail across the net (a Mail Transfer Agent, or MTA, and hint: the web browser that lets you access your e-mail ain't one), and
- keep those computers connected to the net 24x7 so your two MTAs can talk directly to each other whenever they wish, and
- happen to avoid sending traffic through any system (your ISP's, their backbone provider's, or any random router somewhere) on which the sysop is examining traffic for tuning, debugging, or pure enjoyment,
there's gonna be lotsa folks who can read your e-mails.And don't forget any system on which the mail resides momentarily while a backup is in progress (limited by point 1, above, to the two endpoints, but if you slip up...). That means there's a copy of said mail stashed more-or-less permanently on some mag. tape in some unknown person's hands.
There's really a lot to be said for paper. If you insist on digitizing your practice, then don't let any of your systems connect to the Internet, directly or indirectly. (''Oh, we'll just send this to Dr. Kildare, on a floppy---that's safe, right?'' Yeah, until someone breaks into his system.)
I thought the definition of script kiddie was ``someone whose capacity doesn't come close to encompassing X, for all values of X != `run predigested code.' ''
Thus, unless ``changing the configuration of the drivers'' is something hairy enough that no scriptmaster will bother doing it, it's only a matter of time before the kiddies are equipped.
I first heard about the Stockholm situation (which I'm certain is no different from that of NYC, London, Paris (if you read French :-), &c.) from this copy of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-gram newsletter. It's near the bottom---search for ``anecdote''.
Makes me wish I had a WaveLAN...
Now that's an interesting attempt to twist the facts to support an argument. The trouble with the attempt is that we're not ``on the ... bandwagon'', but simply reacting to events.
Take a f'rinstance my beautiful Northern state of Connecticut. A couple of blacks were seen driving an expensive sports car out of a beach parking lot in one of the more well-off areas of the state (Sherwood Island, for those of you who know the area). The cops stopped them, for no justifiable reason, on ``suspicion'' of auto theft. Luckily for the driver, and unluckily for the cops, the driver was an Army general, and his buddy was an Assistant Attorney General for the state. As you can imagine the problem was settled quickly and quietly; I only know about it because one of my friends is a specialist in, shall we say, police-misbehavior cases hereabouts. Sorry I can't give you any independent verification for this one.
However, you can check out the incident of a black Tulsa police officer stopped by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol on a made-up cause, or better yet, the case in which the Border Patrol twice, as two separate events, stopped a Federal judge on his way to his courtroom.
These are just the cases of people with enough clout to raise a proper stink over their unjustified treatment. If you've ever tried to fight City Hall, you know how hard it is for a regular Joe to get a hearing, much less someone from the poor section of town. Nevertheless, when police records are examined (in the cases where they keep good enough records to tell) the evidence is clear---police stop blacks for no reason much more than others.
Well, certainly not, if that ``common sense'' means stopping innocent citizens with no suspicion of their having done anything wrong. And, yes we do posit an alternative---follow the Constitution, stop those who against whom you have some evidence, and let the rest of the citizenry enjoy the rights for which we fought to establish this country.
I hardly know where to start with this one.
Let's grant the DOJ statistics your link points to. (If this were a real discussion, I'd ask whether the stats had been corrected for the innocents convicted because they were only black -----s, and hey, we've closed a case, right? I won't even ask how one defines so amorphous a concept as `race'. In my experience, it's always been ``someone who doesn't match my wonderful genetic makeup''---witness the fact that in the U.S., someone with seven ``white'' great-grandparents and one ``black'' one counts as ``black''. How does that scan in any sane classification system?) Let's even be generous and say the stats are up to 100 ``black'' murderers per 100,000, vs. 5 ``white''s.
So, how do you justify the completely unwarranted harrassment of 99,900 citizens to find 100 murderers? This country was founded on the belief that you're golden until you actually do something wrong, not until someone thinks you're more likely to do something wrong. This is the concept of ``probable cause'' referred to by the Fourth Amendment (in exactly those words). Probable cause is not a statistical concept. Either you've got reason to think this exact person committed that specified crime, or you have no probable cause. By no stretch of the imagination can being ``black'' be probable cause, therefore it is totally unjustifiable to claim you're just checking ``people who commit serious crimes nearly 8 times more than the rest of the population''. Either this particular person (not one of some random people you spot) actually committed a crime, and you have a good reason to think that's the case, or you keep your mitts off.
The trouble today (and in all previous days, for that matter) is that people forget the probable cause, and think police should simply nail all criminals, blithely assuming there's a 100%-valid mechanism for identifying them, and the police have it. That's why most folks today assume anyone arrested is guilty, why it's so insanely painful to be falsely accused, and why it's so dangerous to slack off in watching our public servants.
And when the police are given vastly more efficient methods to harrass everyone, we're in vastly greater danger.
Switching black holes ON and OFF?! This must be some totally-new observation implying a massive change in our UNDERSTANDING of the laws of physics!
Well, no...they're really talking of switching it the same way you'd switch a cliff's lemming consumption off and on, by either fencing the creatures away from the cliff, or herding them toward it. Big deal---compared to the speculation engendered by the headline.
That said, it's still interesting on its own terms: a supernova can first blow massive amounts of matter toward the black hole, supplying it with above-average input. Then, after the shockwave has passed the hole, it drives matter away (by the same mechanism, pushing it ahead of the shock), lowering the amount available for the hole to suck in.
</grouch mode>
Sure you can, but to do so requires a chain of custody from production to courtroom.
This affects all evidence these days. It used to be that you could (mostly) take a photo as evidence that the scene depicted was real, though it would be nice if you had someone to either say ``Yes, I was there, and it looked that way'', or have an expert testify that the photo wasn't tampered with. Now, you need the photographer to testify that she took the photo, and everyone else who had access to the negative (if available) or print to testify that it is unaltered, otherwise you can't assume it's a reflection of reality.
That's the sort of thing the OJ jury saw as introducing a reasonable doubt: the various items of evidence had suspect chains of custody; it was all too possible for someone to have tampered with them. The deal with computerized photo-alterations is simply that they raise the chain-of-custody requirements for photographs to a level not previously needed.
Thus, it's still possible to convict, just harder, because the photo is no longer irrefutable evidence of the event depicted.
And that, boys and girls, is why the cops must bag and label the evidence, keep it under supervised lock and key, and be able to testify that it's unaltered in court---without that it's too easy to convict someone who's the victim of a vendetta. Of course, that's still possible if the vendetta is prosecuted by the cops....