Step 1: Run like headless chickens promising a fiery death through radiation burns to anyone living within 1000 miles of Fukushima.
Step 2: Be somewhere else when scientific findings pour in, showing that the risk on the general population, save for some very specific cases (such as workers at the plant who heroically risked their health trying to fix things), pales by comparison with absolutely every other aspect of the catastrophe (starting with thousands of deaths, injuries and destroyed houses, for entirely non-nuclear reasons).
Step 3: Announce yourself vindicated when Step 1 results in a rash of PTSDs and other mental health issues.
"If the results of professional regulating bodies and the years of inquiries are going to be discarded, then why have them in the first place?"
See, works like that too.
Listen: I know you (/the OP) love a nice feel-good hero story, and Armstrong was a made-for-TV one. But just a few things:
1) Armstrong gave up his rights to challenge the accusations of the USADA and lost all his legal challenges to their jurisdiction over the matter: he is guilty, end of story.
It does not matter whether you are "tired" of fighting accusations or whatever other excuses he could find: if you waive your right to present your case and challenge the accusations, you are implicitly admitting guilt. The USADA is not some Soviets-era corrupt body out to get him (as backed by a couple court decisions against Armstrong claims).
2) For a laugh, have a look at the many articles (have only seen some in French and German, but I'm sure English versions will pop up) that go over what the "revised" winners would be for all the Tour de France titles he might be stripped of: if you eliminate all the other riders who have since been convicted of doping, the actual winner is on average fourth or fifth in the ranking at the time (in one case, all up to the *9th* have been eliminated since).
While the fact that doping is widespread is nothing new, and does not prove in itself that Armstrong did it, think about it for a second: this means that he consistently beat between 3 and 7 people who *were* using doping products. Yea... I guess he was that good.
3) As shown above, doping is rarely detected during the races, but sometimes takes years to come up: sometimes by applying newer scientific methods to older samples, most often by uncovering doping networks (crooked doctors providing the products etc) and identifying the people tied to them. Many of the techniques Armstrong is accused of using (such as transfusions) are extremely difficult to detect, if at all. In such cases, it is perfectly valid to use testimonies.
4) Within the case built by the USADA against him, is a mention of his close relationship with the UCI (as one of their most generous donator) and personal friendship with its president. All things concurring to explain why he may have benefitted from some warnings ahead of tests, as well as unusual leniency when he failed to submit to testing.
5) Despite all that, there *were* two cases where Armstrong did test positive for doping substances. While he successfully (and not very convincingly) fought the first instance (1999), the second one (2005) is still very much outstanding and has not been disproven nor confirmed (due to the "unfortunate" lack of a duplicate sample).
Damn, posted too quickly: 8.3% type II error does not mean 8.3% undetected HIV... Obviously the number would be much lower for an even moderately at-risk population. That is still a rather unacceptable compromise imho.
Given basic human psychology, releasing an HIV test with admittedly low false positive rate, but such ridiculously high false negative (type II error), is borderline criminal.
Let's not forget that the target demographic for such a test is people who are not very keen (for any sort of reason) on taking the test in the first place, otherwise they would just get tested for free at one of the many locations that do it.
Giving these people a false positive (with attached warning regarding reliability of the test) would result in a bit of anxiety and a visit to their local clinic, wherein they'd be told they are actually fine: not much harm done.
Giving them a false negative: the vast majority will breath a sigh of relief and never ever consider going for a real test.
You can tell people "this test is not final, it has a high error rate" all you want (forget even trying to explain the concept of false negatives to the average user): people see what they want to see... In this case, they see a big blinking "you are fine, don't worry", followed by small print they won't bother reading. Meanwhile (for 8.3% of them), their HIV goes untreated.
Re:Nazi's, post war America, and Ticks
on
Insects As Weapons
·
· Score: 1
Nazis developed the first jet engines. Jet engines are the convenient explanation for contrails, which many suspect are in fact laced with mind-control chemicals. Coincidence? I think not!
Also, the fact-based level of your post would be greatly improved by correctly spelling the name of Erich Traub.
> I'll just wait for your phone to download an update for one of the 100 apps that are set to autoupdate whenever it's within range of a wifi, do an injection attack
If only software engineer had devised some sort of method to ensure that code ran on the OS had not been tampered with. And if only Apple engineers had heard of it.
If somebody ever comes up with such a clever method to foil J. Random Criminal's cunning ploy, I suggest we call it something that brings to mind the analogy with real-world transaction authentication adapted to computer systems... "Digital signing", maybe?
Note that by the very generic "web dev", I meant merely the web dev team leader ultimately responsible for the decision to implement their login system that way and not to refactor it. Whoever was in charge of that part, regardless of management pressure, should have known better and clamour for a fix until they got one. Even the most moronic upper exec will bow down to a strident warning that the user database might be vulnerable to "evil hackers" and consequences would be dire if things are left unfixed (you don't get to become upper exec without a modicum of ass-covering skills).
Also: refactoring a (decently designed) system to include salting is a relatively painless task. We aren't talking about a complete refactoring of the DB schema or whatnot.
If so-called professional websites used proper hashing and salting, even password123 would be a halfway decent password.
Without offline cracking, password weaknesses aren't very exploitable (even the most inept server will shut you down after a couple hundred attempts at brute-forcing your way through an online login).
People like to harp on those "idiots" who pick weak passwords that can be cracked with a rainbow table, but unlike the moron web devs who still fail to salt their password DB in 2012, your grandma is not paid to have basic knowledge of computer security.
> it's a lot easier to get corporate policy changed than government
Yea... If only the People had a way to democratically pick members of government, the way they so clearly have a say in who sits at the board of all major corporations...
I get that this is just the standard ultra-libertarian "guvmint's evil" schtick, but I mean, really?
Remember when Standard Oil put pressure on the US government to break its endemic cronyism and latent abuse of power?
Me neither...
Don't drink it regularly... (note that I did not say "don't drink it EVER... it will kill ya... coffee's bad" etc. etc.)
It's not witchcraft, people: coffee is a drug (a reasonably mild one at that), like many drugs your body builds a tolerance to it real fast. The more you drink it, the less effective it is, up until the point where your hourly cup barely keeps you at baseline wakefulness (kinda like crack, really, but much cheaper). I could quote you a gazilion studies on that, but I'm pretty sure you already have that one coworker whose 12 cups/day diet does not make particularly on edge (but who gets the shake if they go without caffeine for a couple days).
Restrain yourself, only drink coffee (in small dosage) when you particularly need the alertness or wakefulness, and you will be making optimal use of it (at minimal cost on your kidneys).
And if 24/7 "optimal mental alertness" is what you are really after, then why do half-measure: just skip to amphetamines directly.
>what, are you a teenager or something? seriously.
What are you, 70 or something?
In the age of email and smartphones, only my mum and my doctor really insist on talking to me, when most of the time the same information can be conveyed in a 10 s. text...
Corporations are in the business of making money... and they have long realised one way of doing that was betting on upper-middle-class consumer guilt to pay a premium in exchange for some sort of vaguely-enforced "ethical business" seal-of-approval. It's a niche market, but a market nonetheless.
Just look at Whole Foods' CEO: not exactly the hippy-dippy type, just a guy who realised there was a market to tap, and tap he did. Call it cynical (it definitely is), but some corporations will behave ethically, just as long as they can make a profit out of it.
Look for the one that costs 3 times the price of those other $100-a-month-Chinese-factory-produced gadgets...
Funny thing is: you (and most other people living in Western countries) would probably not mind so much paying that difference, had their wages not stagnated or downright sunk (relative to inflation and overall cost of life), in part due to all manufacturing jobs getting outsourced to low-paying countries. OK, nevermind: it's not particularly funny.
> Without the crusades, france and eventually the rest of europe might have fallen and been ruled under sharia law
Seriously?
And to think I thought the first part of your comment was the most outlandishly ill-informed bit of historical revisionism I'd read today.
Thanks for making it clearer with that thinly veiled conservative soundbite that you are not, as I first thought, a frightening proof of the failure of the school system, but just another bigoted idiot.
oh, and just so you know: Middle age-era Ottoman empire was one of the most enlightened and progressive society on the face of Earth at the time. I bet those thousands burnt by the Spanish inquisition during and after the Reconquista sure were glad they no longer lived under "sharia law".
"Sounds like the excuse what the French and British agreed to as a cover story. What's reported to the press is often what you're supposed to think."
Have you actually even glanced at the source before making this blanket statement?
This (and many other comments that would be embarrassing for all parties involved) came to light, 20 years later, when the French president's very own shrink decided to publish his former patient's confidences in a book.
Sure: it might have been an incredibly elaborate long game con by Mitterrand to retroactively exonerate himself 10 years after his death, when his psychoanalyst would decide to break doctor-patient confidentiality and publish a book... Personally, I'll go with Occam's razor.
And it will work so much better than facial recognition, because no two people wear the same shoes. And people always wear the same pair of shoes to play games.
Meanwhile, scientists and the population at large on Kepler-22b are celebrating the discovery of Sol-3a: a planet that exhibits the same livable properties as Kepler-22b and offers the promise of an alternative to their resource-abused, irreversibly-climate-warming, short-term-doomed home world.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1: Run like headless chickens promising a fiery death through radiation burns to anyone living within 1000 miles of Fukushima.
Step 2: Be somewhere else when scientific findings pour in, showing that the risk on the general population, save for some very specific cases (such as workers at the plant who heroically risked their health trying to fix things), pales by comparison with absolutely every other aspect of the catastrophe (starting with thousands of deaths, injuries and destroyed houses, for entirely non-nuclear reasons).
Step 3: Announce yourself vindicated when Step 1 results in a rash of PTSDs and other mental health issues.
Race To Mine Bitcoins Drives *Opportunistic Businesses* Into the Chip Making Business... There, fixed it for you.
"If the results of professional regulating bodies and the years of inquiries are going to be discarded, then why have them in the first place?"
See, works like that too.
Listen: I know you (/the OP) love a nice feel-good hero story, and Armstrong was a made-for-TV one. But just a few things:
1) Armstrong gave up his rights to challenge the accusations of the USADA and lost all his legal challenges to their jurisdiction over the matter: he is guilty, end of story.
It does not matter whether you are "tired" of fighting accusations or whatever other excuses he could find: if you waive your right to present your case and challenge the accusations, you are implicitly admitting guilt. The USADA is not some Soviets-era corrupt body out to get him (as backed by a couple court decisions against Armstrong claims).
2) For a laugh, have a look at the many articles (have only seen some in French and German, but I'm sure English versions will pop up) that go over what the "revised" winners would be for all the Tour de France titles he might be stripped of: if you eliminate all the other riders who have since been convicted of doping, the actual winner is on average fourth or fifth in the ranking at the time (in one case, all up to the *9th* have been eliminated since).
While the fact that doping is widespread is nothing new, and does not prove in itself that Armstrong did it, think about it for a second: this means that he consistently beat between 3 and 7 people who *were* using doping products. Yea... I guess he was that good.
3) As shown above, doping is rarely detected during the races, but sometimes takes years to come up: sometimes by applying newer scientific methods to older samples, most often by uncovering doping networks (crooked doctors providing the products etc) and identifying the people tied to them. Many of the techniques Armstrong is accused of using (such as transfusions) are extremely difficult to detect, if at all. In such cases, it is perfectly valid to use testimonies.
4) Within the case built by the USADA against him, is a mention of his close relationship with the UCI (as one of their most generous donator) and personal friendship with its president. All things concurring to explain why he may have benefitted from some warnings ahead of tests, as well as unusual leniency when he failed to submit to testing.
5) Despite all that, there *were* two cases where Armstrong did test positive for doping substances. While he successfully (and not very convincingly) fought the first instance (1999), the second one (2005) is still very much outstanding and has not been disproven nor confirmed (due to the "unfortunate" lack of a duplicate sample).
So, yea, Science(tm)
You mean, like the difference between using a word and its abbreviation?
"dcwg.org"? seriously?
.org website to run a security check on their computer?
Let me get this straight: the FBI is recommending people go to a nondescript
Can I next invite them to go to submit their information at fswrxt.net to check that their credit card wasn't hacked?
Damn, posted too quickly: 8.3% type II error does not mean 8.3% undetected HIV... Obviously the number would be much lower for an even moderately at-risk population. That is still a rather unacceptable compromise imho.
Given basic human psychology, releasing an HIV test with admittedly low false positive rate, but such ridiculously high false negative (type II error), is borderline criminal.
Let's not forget that the target demographic for such a test is people who are not very keen (for any sort of reason) on taking the test in the first place, otherwise they would just get tested for free at one of the many locations that do it.
Giving these people a false positive (with attached warning regarding reliability of the test) would result in a bit of anxiety and a visit to their local clinic, wherein they'd be told they are actually fine: not much harm done.
Giving them a false negative: the vast majority will breath a sigh of relief and never ever consider going for a real test.
You can tell people "this test is not final, it has a high error rate" all you want (forget even trying to explain the concept of false negatives to the average user): people see what they want to see... In this case, they see a big blinking "you are fine, don't worry", followed by small print they won't bother reading. Meanwhile (for 8.3% of them), their HIV goes untreated.
Nazis developed the first jet engines. Jet engines are the convenient explanation for contrails, which many suspect are in fact laced with mind-control chemicals. Coincidence? I think not!
Also, the fact-based level of your post would be greatly improved by correctly spelling the name of Erich Traub.
> I'll just wait for your phone to download an update for one of the 100 apps that are set to autoupdate whenever it's within range of a wifi, do an injection attack
If only software engineer had devised some sort of method to ensure that code ran on the OS had not been tampered with. And if only Apple engineers had heard of it.
If somebody ever comes up with such a clever method to foil J. Random Criminal's cunning ploy, I suggest we call it something that brings to mind the analogy with real-world transaction authentication adapted to computer systems... "Digital signing", maybe?
Note that by the very generic "web dev", I meant merely the web dev team leader ultimately responsible for the decision to implement their login system that way and not to refactor it. Whoever was in charge of that part, regardless of management pressure, should have known better and clamour for a fix until they got one.
Even the most moronic upper exec will bow down to a strident warning that the user database might be vulnerable to "evil hackers" and consequences would be dire if things are left unfixed (you don't get to become upper exec without a modicum of ass-covering skills).
Also: refactoring a (decently designed) system to include salting is a relatively painless task. We aren't talking about a complete refactoring of the DB schema or whatnot.
If so-called professional websites used proper hashing and salting, even password123 would be a halfway decent password.
Without offline cracking, password weaknesses aren't very exploitable (even the most inept server will shut you down after a couple hundred attempts at brute-forcing your way through an online login).
People like to harp on those "idiots" who pick weak passwords that can be cracked with a rainbow table, but unlike the moron web devs who still fail to salt their password DB in 2012, your grandma is not paid to have basic knowledge of computer security.
> housing ain't cheap in Japan
Housing is very cheap in Japan (cheaply bought and cheaply built).
Land is expensive. Not housing.
The point here is not really to save the house, but saving the people inside.
> it's a lot easier to get corporate policy changed than government
Yea... If only the People had a way to democratically pick members of government, the way they so clearly have a say in who sits at the board of all major corporations...
I get that this is just the standard ultra-libertarian "guvmint's evil" schtick, but I mean, really?
Remember when Standard Oil put pressure on the US government to break its endemic cronyism and latent abuse of power?
Me neither...
Don't drink it regularly... (note that I did not say "don't drink it EVER... it will kill ya... coffee's bad" etc. etc.)
It's not witchcraft, people: coffee is a drug (a reasonably mild one at that), like many drugs your body builds a tolerance to it real fast. The more you drink it, the less effective it is, up until the point where your hourly cup barely keeps you at baseline wakefulness (kinda like crack, really, but much cheaper). I could quote you a gazilion studies on that, but I'm pretty sure you already have that one coworker whose 12 cups/day diet does not make particularly on edge (but who gets the shake if they go without caffeine for a couple days).
Restrain yourself, only drink coffee (in small dosage) when you particularly need the alertness or wakefulness, and you will be making optimal use of it (at minimal cost on your kidneys).
And if 24/7 "optimal mental alertness" is what you are really after, then why do half-measure: just skip to amphetamines directly.
>what, are you a teenager or something? seriously.
What are you, 70 or something?
In the age of email and smartphones, only my mum and my doctor really insist on talking to me, when most of the time the same information can be conveyed in a 10 s. text...
Valid assumption, wrong conclusion.
Corporations are in the business of making money... and they have long realised one way of doing that was betting on upper-middle-class consumer guilt to pay a premium in exchange for some sort of vaguely-enforced "ethical business" seal-of-approval. It's a niche market, but a market nonetheless.
Just look at Whole Foods' CEO: not exactly the hippy-dippy type, just a guy who realised there was a market to tap, and tap he did. Call it cynical (it definitely is), but some corporations will behave ethically, just as long as they can make a profit out of it.
Look for the one that costs 3 times the price of those other $100-a-month-Chinese-factory-produced gadgets...
Funny thing is: you (and most other people living in Western countries) would probably not mind so much paying that difference, had their wages not stagnated or downright sunk (relative to inflation and overall cost of life), in part due to all manufacturing jobs getting outsourced to low-paying countries. OK, nevermind: it's not particularly funny.
> Without the crusades, france and eventually the rest of europe might have fallen and been ruled under sharia law
Seriously?
And to think I thought the first part of your comment was the most outlandishly ill-informed bit of historical revisionism I'd read today.
Thanks for making it clearer with that thinly veiled conservative soundbite that you are not, as I first thought, a frightening proof of the failure of the school system, but just another bigoted idiot.
oh, and just so you know: Middle age-era Ottoman empire was one of the most enlightened and progressive society on the face of Earth at the time. I bet those thousands burnt by the Spanish inquisition during and after the Reconquista sure were glad they no longer lived under "sharia law".
"Sounds like the excuse what the French and British agreed to as a cover story. What's reported to the press is often what you're supposed to think."
Have you actually even glanced at the source before making this blanket statement?
This (and many other comments that would be embarrassing for all parties involved) came to light, 20 years later, when the French president's very own shrink decided to publish his former patient's confidences in a book.
Sure: it might have been an incredibly elaborate long game con by Mitterrand to retroactively exonerate himself 10 years after his death, when his psychoanalyst would decide to break doctor-patient confidentiality and publish a book... Personally, I'll go with Occam's razor.
And it will work so much better than facial recognition, because no two people wear the same shoes. And people always wear the same pair of shoes to play games.
What happened? Taking a rest from hyping up stale BitCoin stories in order to sell us glorified corporate loyalty program points instead?
Meanwhile, scientists and the population at large on Kepler-22b are celebrating the discovery of Sol-3a: a planet that exhibits the same livable properties as Kepler-22b and offers the promise of an alternative to their resource-abused, irreversibly-climate-warming, short-term-doomed home world.